Sphinx (search engine)

Sphinx is a full-text search engine, which is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL version 2 ). However, there is also a commercial version for embedded systems. Its main advantages plays Sphinx in the implementation of their own search engines for programs or web applications that need to process large amounts of data in a short time.

It is basically a stand-alone engine, but it has been designed to work specifically with SQL-based databases and scripting languages ​​.

Currently are supported as database systems MySQL and PostgreSQL. However, there are to store the data by means of a custom XML format also possible via the pipe.

In addition, the driver model was designed to be open, so that more database connections can be implemented easily.

Native PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby are supported as a scripting language. For programming languages ​​that do not have Sphinx API and in cases where you absolutely want to perform the search on MySQL to SphinxSE is. SphinxSE is a Storage Engine, which was implemented as a MySQL plugin and used as search backend Sphinx. This will also gives the advantage that the search results can be further processed with MySQL.