Searching With
Thinking Sphinx
Dan Pickett

I Know What You’re Thinking...
But, No

The Sphinx We’re
Talking About
Yes, the Eye is looking at you

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)

Can Haz Search?
What’s Out There
• Direct SQL
• Ferret
• SOLR
• Lucene
• Sphinx
Every time you integrate Ferret, an angel weeps for you

Courtesy of: Evan Weaver, “Rails Search Benchmarks” 03/17/08
‘Nuff Said
Although angels are known to be emotional characters

UltraSphinx
Also, Evan Weaver likes Thinking Sphinx

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

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

Let’s Play A Game...
Where the F*ck is Carmen Sandiego?©
Courtesy: Bob-Rz @ Deviant Art 02/19/07
“Where the F*ck is Carmen Sandiego?” is a registered trademark of Enlight Solutions, Inc. Well, not really but it sounds cool.
Honestly, though, does anyone ever read the fine print? You should be paying attention to the presentation. On we go...seriously,
focus people.

Define your Index of Suspects

InstallShield FTL
Let’s Use Rake
• rake ts:config
• rake ts:in
• rake ts:start
• rake ts:stop
• rake ts:restart

Get to Work, Detective

Make Your Arrest
That was easy...

Additional Features
• Match Modes
• Sort Modes
• Polymorphism
• Field Weighting
• Integration with will_paginate

What I Wish I Knew
Serious Mullet
Protip: Despite its misleading name, Rockapella does not rock

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

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...

What’s Missing?
• Excerpting
• Strong Facet Support
• ASpell Integration/Spell Check support
Blah, blah, blah - You must be getting thirsty by now

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?

Thanks
• Follow me on Twitter
• www.twitter.com/dpickett
• Check out my blog
• www.enlightsolutions.com
• Recommend me

Questions?