Xaprb

Peter wrote about this recently, but I don’t know if it was really clear what was going on.

Point One: Sphinx can be contacted by the MySQL protocol. Not “as a MySQL storage engine.” Not “from MySQL.” It understands the MySQL protocol itself. So from the protocol point of view, the Sphinx search daemon can look just like a MySQL server.

Point Two: Sphinx understands a SQL-like query language. Don’t be fooled. You’re not writing SQL. It just looks like you are.

Point Three: Because of point One and point Two, you can use the mysql command-line client program to talk directly to Sphinx, with absolutely no MySQL server anywhere in sight. This also means you can connect to Sphinx from your application and query it, exactly like connecting to a MySQL server and querying it.

Go take a look at Peter’s blog post. He’s not writing MySQL queries. He’s writing queries to Sphinx.

Now think about how cool this is — how easy this is to integrate with your code that already communicates with MySQL. Is there any other external full-text search system that masquerades as a MySQL server? I don’t know of one.

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the sessions:

• CouchDB: Behind the Buzz (Jan Lehnardt)
• Performance Instrumentation: Beyond What You Do Now (Cary Millsap)
• Hive: Distributed Data Warehousing with Hadoop (Ashish Thusoo and Prasad Chakka, Facebook)
• High Performance Erlang (Jan Henry Nystrom)

These are not just people who’ve learned about something and want to talk at you. These are the inventors, the originators, the gurus. It is truly the who’s who, and that’s just a few of them. If you aren’t familiar with those names, Google them and see. And after that, why not Google Theo Schlossnagle, Eric Burton, Monty Widenius, Andrew Aksyonoff, and a few others.

I hope to see you there. Bring your business cards and introduce yourself to me!

The Sphinx project just released version 0.9.8, with many enhancements since the previous release. There’s never been a better time to try it out. It’s really cool technology.

What is Sphinx? Glad you asked. It’s fast, efficient, scalable, relevant full-text searching and a heck of a lot more. In fact, Sphinx complements MySQL for a lot of non-search queries that MySQL frankly isn’t very good at, including WHERE clauses on low-selectivity columns, ORDER BY with a LIMIT and OFFSET, and GROUP BY. A lot of you are probably running fairly simple queries with these constructs and getting really bad performance in MySQL. I see it a lot when I’m working with clients, and there’s often not much room for optimization. Sphinx can execute a subset of such queries very efficiently, due to its smart I/O algorithms and the way it uses memory. By “subset” I mean you don’t get the full complexity of SQL, but you get enough functionality for lots of the poorly-performing queries I see in the wild. It’s a 95% solution.

Is Sphinx for you? Good question. You can find answers in Appendix C in High Performance MySQL. And yes, that is why I wrote this blog post — to put in a plug for the book. *grin* But before I go, let me put in another plug for Sphinx: go vote for it on Sourceforge! If it’s voted as one of the Community Choice projects of the year, that will be fantastic.