4. What is Full Text,
Indexed Search?
• Searches for keyword matches
• Think of the DB “like” operator on steroids
• File based index (reduces DB load)
• Relevance Ranking / Phrase Proximity
• Two step process
• Query the DB and create indices (indexer)
• Search against created indices (searchd)
5. Can Haz Search?
What’s Out There
• Direct SQL
• Ferret
• SOLR
• Lucene
• Sphinx
Every time you integrate Ferret, an angel weeps for you
6. Courtesy of: Evan Weaver, “Rails Search Benchmarks” 03/17/08
‘Nuff Said
Although angels are known to be emotional characters
8. Why Sphinx Rocks
• Relevance Ratings and Phrase Proximity
• Active Development
• searchd Daemon doesn’t hog memory
• Delta Indexing
• Fast Indexing + Querying
• Distributed Capability
You rock too, but Sphinx is cooler
9. Why TS Rocks
• Maximizes use of the Riddle Client
• Sort modes
• Match modes
• Great support and active community
• Available as a gem and a plug-in
• Beautiful Code
• Pat Allan is the man
That was mean - I apologize for the burn in the last slide.
You are equally as cool as Sphinx
17. Additional Features
• Match Modes
• Sort Modes
• Polymorphism
• Field Weighting
• Integration with will_paginate
18. What I Wish I Knew
Serious Mullet
Protip: Despite its misleading name, Rockapella does not rock
19. What I Wish I Knew
About Integrating TS
• Sometimes the indexer silently fails
• Watch your output
• Disregard the Distributed Index warning
• Use delta indexing
• Run regular index tasks
• Use delayed_job or another queue manager to
handle delta indexing
What time is it? Beer o’clock
20. What I Wish I Knew
About Deploying TS
• Store PID files in a shared folder
• Ensure you’ve set proper permissions
• Set memory limits on indexing
• mem_limit option in sphinx.yml
• For large data sets, indices can be extremely large
• Ensure you have a surplus of storage capacity
Are we done yet? It’s about that time for a beer...
21. What’s Missing?
• Excerpting
• Strong Facet Support
• ASpell Integration/Spell Check support
Blah, blah, blah - You must be getting thirsty by now
22. It’s a Young but
Awesome Utility
• Clone the source and see for yourself
• freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx
• Cucumber test-suite
• Extremely well architected
• Join the mailing list (Google Groups)
Did he mention Pat Allan is the man, yet?
23. Thanks
• Follow me on Twitter
• www.twitter.com/dpickett
• Check out my blog
• www.enlightsolutions.com
• Recommend me