Sphinx (SQL Phrase Index) is a full-text search engine developed by Andrei Aksenov and distributed under the GNU GPL license. Its distinctive feature is a high speed of indexing and searching, as well as integration with existing DBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and API for popular web programming languages.
Main features:
- High indexing speed (up to 10-15 MB/sec per processor core);
- High search speed (up to 150-250 queries per second per processor core with 1,000,000 documents);
- High scalability (the largest known cluster indexes up to 3 000 000 000 documents and supports more than 50 million queries per day);
- Support for distributed search;
- Support for multiple full-text search fields in a document (up to 32 by default);
- Support for several additional attributes for each document (i.e. groups, timestamps, etc.);
- Support for stop words;
- Support for single-byte encodings and UTF-8;
- Morphological search support - built-in modules for English, Russian and Czech; modules for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian available;
- Native support for PostgreSQL and MySQL;
- Support for ODBC compatible databases (MS SQL, Oracle, etc.).