Sphinx features

Key Sphinx features are:

  • high indexing and searching performance;
  • advanced indexing and querying tools (flexible and feature-rich text tokenizer, querying language, several different ranking modes, etc);
  • advanced result set post-processing (SELECT with expressions, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, HAVING etc over text search results);
  • proven scalability up to billions of documents, terabytes of data, and thousands of queries per second;
  • easy integration with SQL and XML data sources, and SphinxQL, SphinxAPI, or SphinxSE search interfaces;
  • easy scaling with distributed searches.

To expand a bit, Sphinx:

  • has high indexing speed (upto 10-15 MB/sec per core on an internal benchmark);
  • has high search speed (upto 150-250 queries/sec per core against 1,000,000 documents, 1.2 GB of data on an internal benchmark);
  • has high scalability (biggest known cluster indexes over 3,000,000,000 documents, and busiest one peaks over 50,000,000 queries/day);
  • provides good relevance ranking through combination of phrase proximity ranking and statistical (BM25) ranking;
  • provides distributed searching capabilities;
  • provides document excerpts (snippets) generation;
  • provides searching from within application with SphinxQL or SphinxAPI interfaces, and from within MySQL with pluggable SphinxSE storage engine;
  • supports boolean, phrase, word proximity and other types of queries;
  • supports multiple full-text fields per document (upto 32 by default);
  • supports multiple additional attributes per document (ie. groups, timestamps, etc);
  • supports stopwords;
  • supports morphological word forms dictionaries;
  • supports tokenizing exceptions;
  • supports UTF-8 encoding;
  • supports stemming (stemmers for English, Russian, Czech and Arabic are built-in; and stemmers for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, are available by building third party libstemmer library);
  • supports MySQL natively (all types of tables, including MyISAM, InnoDB, NDB, Archive, etc are supported);
  • supports PostgreSQL natively;
  • supports ODBC compliant databases (MS SQL, Oracle, etc) natively;
  • ...has 50+ other features not listed here, refer configuration manual!
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