MySQL 5.6 InnoDB Full Text Search

Question

I realize that MySQL 5.6 is still in beta, but does anyone have experience using the new InnoDB FTS engine? How does it compare to something like Sphinx?

Thanks Jason

Answer 1

Never used Sphinx, but tried MySQL 5.6 FTS on an Innodb table with about 170k rows. Made an FTS index on the name column (contains all names of a person). To find a word in any position of the string MATCH(name) AGAINST("+word*") IN BOOLEAN MODE does work a lot faster (2-3 times in my case) than using name LIKE "word%" OR name LIKE "% word". However when making joins do check EXPLAIN to see if the FTS index is actually used. It seems MySQL optimizer is not that good at guessing when the FTS index should be used.