Speaking of registration..., have you heard we're bringing the Sphinx Search Day to the USA, on the 13th of April in Santa Clara, CA the day following the MySQL Percona Live Conference and Expo. If you are interested in attending the Sphinx Search Day or the MySQL Conference, we recently blogged about a 10% discount for the MySQL Conference and the Sphinx Search Day is FREE so take advantage of your 10% discount now and don't forget to register for the Sphinx Search Day. If you are unable to attend either of these events or your would just like to know where we are going to be for the next month, check out our schedule below:

And last, but defiantly not least! During the month April we have some limited availability for on-site visits in US. So please contact us if you are interested in bringing a Sphinx expert into your environment.

All the new features in version 2.0.3 are enterprise grade and fully covered by our support packages. From this point forward the 2.0 branch will receive priority bugfixes therefore we recommend upgrading to this version before filing any bugreports. In addition, we will push new features to the beta branch as soon as they are stable enough for real-world applications. But, if you are fascinated (like we are) with bright, shiny, and new things you can always check out our current development version.

On behalf of the Sphinx Team we would like to thank you for use of the Sphinx Engine and wish you a Happy New Year!]]> http://sphinxsearch.com/news/48.html shodan Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:27:38 +0200 Sphinx version 2.0.2-beta is now out, with over 30 new features, options, and other significant changes. It also marks a feature freeze of the 2.0.x branch, and 2.0.3-release is scheduled shortly.

The most important new features in 2.0.2-beta are the new MVA64 attribute type, dict=keywords and MVA support in RT indexes, expression-based ranker, ATTACH INDEX statement, and WHERE support in UPDATE statement.

Read on for a quick discussion of the biggest new ones and the planned release cycle, or just proceed to Downloads and grab it already!

MVA64 attributes are a further extension of our MVA feature. MVAs let you store a set of unsigned 32-bit values, MVA64 now enables signed 64-bit values in addition to that. This is useful to avoid CRC32 collisions when hashing string tags, or to encode extra auxiliary data into your MVA. They're supported in both disk and RT indexes.

Word start (prefix) searching in RT indexes is now supported through the dict=keywords feature. We deliberately chose to not implement prefix and infix pre-indexing from disk indexes in RT, because that would have been a huge memory hog. Substring (infix) searching support with dict=keywords is in development now, and schedule for 2.1.x branch.

MVA and index_exact_words in RT indexes are also supported now.

The new ATTACH INDEX statement is important because it lets you quickly convert from disk to RT index. That's right, you now can quickly batch index the main bulk of your data, then easily switch to RT, and keep updating the RT index. Right now, ATTACH only lets you convert the index once, and requires an empty RT target. However, enabling batch imports into existing, non-empty RT indexes is planned. That is why we chose to reserve ATTACH upfront instead of something like CONVERT.

UPDATE statement now supports full-blown conditions in WHERE, both with disk and RT indexes, too. So, say, updating prices on a 1000 rows from vendor X or just marking them for deletion just became 1000 times easier. Just like attributes UPDATEs themselves, this should also work in both disk and RT backends.

And last but not least, you can now create your own relevance formulas on the fly with the aid of the expression ranker. Previously, computing relevance values was limited to a number of built-in rankers, and changing the formula that combined various internal ranking factors (not to be confused with attributes) involved writing C++ code, and rebuilding and restarting searchd. From now on, you only need to specify a short and sweet formula, you can do on the fly on a per-query basis, and many more ranking factors are now available than we ever computed before. Amusingly, this is not even super slow: on my smallish 1,000,000-document test collection, emulating the default ranker with the expression based one was just 1.1x to 1.3x slower than the compiled C++ code.

Besides the new features, we have also been busy improving our internal testing, build, and release processes. And the next release, 2.0.3-release is now scheduled in approximately 1 month from now, as opposed to the long standing tradition of shipping it when it's done. We did a lot of testing for 2.0.2-beta, there are no known major issues, and the pre-existing functionality must be more stable than ever. However, our policy is not to tag it "release" until it received even more testing from the community. Thus, if you bump into anything in 2.0.2-beta, please be sure to report the issue! The earlier you report it, the sooner it gets fixed.

From there, the release plan is as follows. 2.0.x branch is now frozen and will only receive bug fixes. So after 2.0.3-release we are going to publish bugfix releases on regular basis. The specific intervals are going to be anywhere between 1 and 3 months, depending on the number and severity of reported and fixed issues.

Overall, we added a bunch of cool new stuff in 2.0.2, 2.0.x branch is now feature frozen and will be supported from here, there's more new exciting stuff coming in 2.1.x, and this post is getting long. So grab a new version, give it a whirl, and be sure to report any issues so we could work on them for the forthcoming 2.0.3. And thanks for choosing Sphinx!

Thank you for the patience!

Vladimir Fedorkov,
Director of Professional Services]]> http://sphinxsearch.com/news/45.html shodan Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:10:31 +0200 Sphinx Search customer portal news.

We're going to upgrade software on our customer portal in few hours from now. customers.sphinxsearch.com will be temporary unavailable today until approx 11:30am EST. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you are existing customer and you have an urgent request for us during customers.sphinxsearch.com unavailability - please contact me directly or use our emergency line.

Vladimir Fedorkov,
Director of Professional Services]]> http://sphinxsearch.com/news/44.html shodan Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:19:10 +0200 We've been recently asked about MVA (Multi Value Attribute) support in Sphinx Real-Time indexes on NYPHP meetup.

As promised we're letting you know: MVA support is just committed to Sphinx code base!

If you'd like to be early adopter and help Sphinx community with testing - please feel free to download current trunk using:

svn checkout http://sphinxsearch.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

Share your experience with MVA attributes in RT indexes in our forum!]]> http://sphinxsearch.com/news/43.html shodan Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:31:01 +0200

A book about Sphinx Search Server from it's creator is now available!

You can get your own copy of "Introduction to Search with Sphinx" ebook right now (and/or pre-order a printed copy) from O'Reilly website.

It is also additionally available from Amazon.com

Enjoy!

In addition to RT indexes, it also brings preforked and threaded modes, string attributes, full SphinxQL support (with access to all searchd functions), advanced features such as hitless and blended indexing, optimized index format, and a lot more. A complete list of new 1.10-beta features is available in documentation.

How stable are RT indexes and can one use those in production? Pretty much, especially when backed with a Full or Premium support package to guarantee priority fixes and emergency support respectively. RT indexes are already deployed in production by several early adopters, and are reported to work well. Even though we've been focusing on functionality and stability rather than performance for this release, the latter is also reasonable.

And that's exactly what that "beta" tag is supposed to mean: while there are things missing from RT indexes, and might be bugs found in both RT and other new features, no major issues are however known. Plus the pre-existing features should be as stable as ever.

And yes, with SphinxQL, RT indexes, transactions, crash recovery and other goodies Sphinx now feels almost real close to a database. Except that our full-text searches are still fast!

We are not doing a booth this year, so if you'd like to meet either myself, Andrew Aksyonoff (technical honcho, fingers behind most of the code), or Richard Kelm (sales/customer support honcho, voice behind that 888 number), please do get in touch upfront. I'm staying for a few more days in SF Bay area so we're not really bound to meeting at conference site on the conference dates.

Speaking of which, that also might be a good occasion for a quick onsite consulting visit either in SF Bay or generally in the US. If you have any questions regarding this or would like to schedule a visit please feel free to call 888-333-1345 or email Richard via

And for those who can't attend MySQL UC and hear us talking, we're now blogging. News section on the frontpage isn't a really properly fitting format for everything that can be shared, which is probably one of the reasons it's updated so infrequently. So check out our new Sphinx blog for more things Sphinx: articles, tips, general musings, fun facts, you name it. The blog even comes prefilled.

Last but not least, despite the announcements, we're still mostly busy coding rather talking or blogging most of the time. And those activities tend to offset other ones (like documenting and packaging) lately. Which is, for instance, why real-time updates are in fact already available from public SVN trunk but not in a tarball or RPM form just yet.

So do get in touch. Whether it's attending a talk, following a blog, meeting at the conference, or volunteering to help us with something, we're looking forward to meeting you!