NWRUG
March 2009
Sponsored by:

Search
• Sphinx + Thinking Sphinx (Will Jessop)
• Solr (Asa Calow)
• Ferret, and maybe Xapian (John Leach)

Sphinx + Thinking Sphinx
Will Jessop

All you need is…
>> query = \"The cat sat on the mat\"
=> \"The cat sat on the mat\"
>> where = \"(email like '%#{ query.split(/\\s+/).map{|term| term.downcase }.join(\"%') OR (email
like '%\") }')\"
=> \"(email like '%the%') OR (email like '%cat%') OR (email like '%sat%') OR (email like '%on%')
OR (email like '%the%') OR (email like '%mat')\"
>>execute(“select * from users where #{where}”)
=> fail
PHP
Congratulations, you are now a l33t programmer!
^
Job done!

All you need is…
>> query = \"The cat sat on the mat\"
=> \"The cat sat on the mat\"
>> where = \"(email like '%#{ query.split(/\\s+/).map{|term| term.downcase }.join(\"%') OR (email
like '%\") }')\"
=> \"(email like '%the%') OR (email like '%cat%') OR (email like '%sat%') OR (email like '%on%')
OR (email like '%the%') OR (email like '%mat')\"
>>execute(“select * from users where #{where}”)
=> fail
PHP
Congratulations, you are now a l33t programmer!
^
Job done!

Why not use the DB?
• Building up SQL queries in
code sucks
• Full text indexing in DBs isn’t
great either
• DB’s are hard to scale

Why not use the DB?
• Building up SQL queries in
code sucks
• Full text indexing in DBs isn’t
great either
• DB’s are hard to scale

Sphinx is…
• Sphinx is a full-text search engine
• Open source (GPL version 2)
• Standalone
• Proven stable
• Performs well

Sphinx
Much better than Solr and Ferret

Sphinx
Much better than Solr and Ferret
Maybe

Installing sphinx
sudo port install sphinx

Out of the box
• indexer - utility which creates fulltext indexes
• searchd - daemon which enables external software to search fulltext
indexes
Amongst other things

Using with your app
Two Ruby on Rails APIs
• Ultra Sphinx
• Thinking Sphinx

Installing Ultra Sphinx
cd rails_app && script/plugin install git://github.com/
freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git

Questions

Resources
• http://reinh.com/blog/2008/07/14/a-
thinking-mans-sphinx.html
• http://ts.freelancing-gods.com/
• http://ts.freelancing-gods.com/rdoc/
• http://www.sphinxsearch.com/