Sphinx2
- 1. Full Text Search Engine
- 2. What is Sphinx? Sphinx is a standalone software package provides fast and relevant full- text search functionality to client applications. It was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases storing the data, and to be easily accessed by scripting languages. However, Sphinx does not depend on nor require any specific database to function. On a live database of nearly 300,000 rows of five indexed columns, where each column contains about 15 words, Sphinx can yield a result for an "any of these words" search in 1/100th of a second (on a 2-GHz AMD Opteron processor with 1 GB of RAM running Debian Linux® Sarge).
- 3. Key features of Sphinx It can index any data you can represent as a string. It can index the same data in different ways. With multiple indexes, each tuned for a specific purpose, you can choose the most appropriate index to optimize search results. It can associate attributes with each piece of indexed data. You can then use one or more of the attributes to further filter search results. It supports morphology, so a search for the word "cats" also finds the root word "cat." You can distribute a Sphinx index among many machines, providing failover. It can create indexes of word prefixes of arbitrary length and indexes of infix substrings of varying lengths. For instance, a part number may be 10 characters wide. The prefix index would match against all possible substrings anchored at the start of the string. The infix index would match substrings anywhere within the string. You can run it as a storage engine within MySQL V5.
- 4. Sphinx has three components: an index generator, a search engine, and a command-line search utility: The index generator is called indexer. It queries your database, indexes each column in each row of the result, and ties each index entry to the row's primary key. The search engine is a daemon called searchd. The daemon receives search terms and other parameters, scours one or more indices, and returns a result. If a match is made, searchd returns an array of primary keys. Given those keys, an application can run a query against the associated database to find the complete records that comprise the match. Searchd communicates to applications through a socket connection on port 3312. The handy search utility lets you conduct searches from the command line without writing code. If searchd returns a match, search queries the database and displays the rows in the match set. The search utility is useful for debugging your Sphinx configuration and performing impromptu searches.
- 5. The indexer will query the database based on the config parameter sql_query E.G. of use source src1 { sql_query = SELECT id, group_id, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_added) AS date_added, title, content FROM documents sql_query_info = SELECT * FROM documents WHERE id=$id } index test1 { source path = @CONFDIR@/data/test1 charset_type } = src1 = utf-8
- 6. indexer { mem_limit = 246M } searchd { listen listen = 9306:mysql41 log = @CONFDIR@/log/searchd.log query_log = @CONFDIR@/log/query.log pid_file = @CONFDIR@/log/searchd.pid max_matches = 1000 binlog_path } = 9312 = @CONFDIR@/data
- 7. How we utilise Sphinx Search Sphinx Index‟s all product User search‟s term (bra) Results gathered from Sphinx Results saved to MySQL database 2ND User search’s term (bra) Result are gather MySQL database
- 8. How we should utilise Sphinx User search Sphinx generates results e.g. product ID‟s Results are displayed to User Query MySQL database by ID‟s
- 9. On Agent Provocateur we currently we store our result from Sphinx to the following table which I presume is same with all our clients. MySQL Tables search_refine_result search_results Sphinx search‟s term‟s based on specific set of fields on the products, rangesty, ranges, styles, sizes, colours, and menu tables which is defined by the index query on the Sphinx configuration file. Configuration directory : (client_dir)/scripts/search/sphinx.conf
- 10. API usage e.g. <?php include sphinxapi.php; $sphinx = new sphinxClient(); $sphinx->Query(„@prodgroup “GRP101”‟); Get‟s all product in the product under the product groupid 101
- 11. Is a Search engine necessary? Website implementing search capabilities with high traffic volumes a search engine is diffidently necessary, some searches may be more specialized than the database can perform, or a search may be so complicated that the required SQL JOINs are simply too slow to keep up with a high volume of search queries. Our usage of Sphinx is very limited due to the search result being restored back into the MySQL database. Sphinx is more than capable enough to manage all search queries. It‟s certainly necessary to incorporate a search engine on our clients website however we will need to implement the search engine in a more flexible and expandable way easily deployable to new and old clients.