Indexing Stuff & Things with Sphinx and Perl

Brett gave an overview of the work he has been doing with the Sphinx search server. The tool allows you to do a full-text search over data that is stored in a number of different stores, including SQL. The system consists of an indexer and a search server that are run separately. The server keeps all of the data indexes in memory for speed.

Searches use a subset of SQL. All indexing is done internally using integers, so text is encoded as integers using a CRC32 operation. In addition to data queried from a SQL database, the tool supports getting data from other sources in the XMLPipe2 format.

The attendees were interested and asked several questions. This system works a little differently than more traditional approaches to searching data, so the questions served to clarify the unfamiliar points.

The slides and hangout are available.

We had 13 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.