Hi all,

Several weeks ago, Eric Day added support for Drizzle into the main part of Sphinx, the indexer. I was testing and noticed the the "search" utility, which searches an index directly and can have a query that fetches whatever is needed from the database using the document IDs from the search,

sql_query_info

and found that no results came from the database. That's because "search" only has MySQL support, whereas the main Sphinx code base has support for a number of databases, and uses inheritance to easily support them all so that whatever database you use, it automatically uses the correct connection. So, I added drizzle support to "search". The one issue is that unlike the indexer, "search" can only support one database as a time. So, if you want to compile in Drizzle support, you have to disable MySQL support for "search" to work correctly:

./configure --with-drizzle --without-mysql
…

Peter wrote about this recently, but I don’t know if it was really clear what was going on.

Point One: Sphinx can be contacted by the MySQL protocol. Not “as a MySQL storage engine.” Not “from MySQL.” It understands the MySQL protocol itself. So from the protocol point of view, the Sphinx search daemon can look just like a MySQL server.

Point Two: Sphinx understands a SQL-like query language. Don’t be fooled. You’re not writing SQL. It just looks like you are.

Point Three: Because of point One and point Two, you can use the mysql command-line client program to talk directly to Sphinx, with absolutely no MySQL server anywhere in sight. This also means you can connect …

In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL - SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with.

A thing to mention - unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright or KickFire take over execution after parsing, Sphinx MySQL support has nothing to do with MySQL - it is implementation of the wire protocol from scratch.

For this test I was not interesting in the full text search performance, we already know Sphinx is much faster than MySQL build in full text search. I was rather interested to look performance of other queries, not using Full Text Search.

…

Meetup Mashup We just had a fun Programmer’s Schmooze this past Sunday with the PHP/MySQL & Semantic Web meetups. These informal meetings are a great chance to network with people from different disciplines. We had an interesting fellow join us … Continue reading →

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …

Here are the slides from yesterday’s presentation about horizontal database scaling through sharding at the mySQL dev room at FOSDEM 2009.

I’ve got a ton of notes and remarks to these slides, which will become available here soon.

Percona's patches are now available to a wider audience via OurDelta, a community effort to provide  builds with features (Percona patches, Google patches, etc) and storage engines (PBXT, Sphinx, etc) that aren't in the main MySQL server. Arjen Lentz is really the brainchild behind this. Kudos Arjen!

What does this mean for the Percona patches? Well, now you can get them in more places.  But it doesn't change our own commitment to keep innovating in ways our customers (and we ourselves) find useful.  We're still building our own builds and …

I gave a webinar several weeks ago about Grazr's infrastructure, lessons we learned about scaling and over-building. One thing that I noticed a lot of interest in was how we used Sphinx to not only improve our search, but releive the database of FULLTEXT indices, which were a performance issue for us.

The purpose of these posts are to give you an idea of how Sphinx works, any limitations it has, and how you can use for both search functionality, as well as freeing your database from having to use FULLTEXT. I think Sphinx is a great project, and want to share info that can help promote its use.

There is a lot of information on Sphinx to share, so I'm going to make this a multiple post, in parts. I'm already working on a book, and Sphinx information could be a small book of its own!

Grazr overview, from FULLTEXT to Sphinx

Grazr is a company who derives it's searchable content from …

Hello all -- I am giving a webinar tomorrow, hosted by Jimmy Guerrero titled "Grazr: Lessons Learned using MySQL and Memcached in Web 2.0 Applications", 10:00 AM PDT, 13:00 EDT

I'll be discussing the use of Memcached, MySQL, Replication, Sphinx, etc, all the fun lessons we've learned at Grazr over the past year and a half or so.

The link for the event can be found here:

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/

The dry run went great today! Hopefully the cat won't mess with my tongue and I'll be just as talkative tomorrow as I was today. Just have to sip up extra Yerba Mate beforehand!

As you may know mysql fulltext search is not highly scalable.  One of the options to get around this scalability limitation, which I prefer, is to use Sphinx.  You can use Sphinx with out having to alter your mysql installation.  But, if you would like to use from within mysql and not have to worry about how to pass data between Sphinx and MySQL, you can enable sphinxse (sphinx storage engine).  It is not included with mysql by default so you will have to compile it yourself.

Here are the instructions on how to get sphinxse compiled with your mysql installation on CentOS x64.  I am sure same instructions will work for other flavors but I have not tested it.  I will be compiling the most current version of sphinx (0.9.8) with most current stable version of mysql (5.0.51b) at the time of the writing.  Let’s get the appropriate …