Sphinx vs. MySql - Search through list of friends (efficiency/speed)

Question

I\'m porting my application searches over to Sphinx from MySQL and am having a hard time figuring this one out, or if it even needs to be ported at all (I really want to know if

Answer 1

so I'm going to go ahead and kinda outline what -I- feel the best use cases for sphinx are and you can kinda decide if it's more or less in line for what you're looking to do.

If all you're looking to do is a string search one one field; then with MySQL you can do wild card searches without much trouble and honstly with an index on it unless you're expecting millions of rows you are going to be fine.

Now take facebook, that is not only indexing names, but pages ect or even any advanced search fields. Sphinx can take in x columns from MySQL, PostGRES, MongoDB, (insert your db you want here) and create a searchable full-text index across all of those.

Example:

You have 5 fields (house number, street, city, state, zipcode) and you want to do a full text search across all of those. Now with MySQL you could do searches on every single one, however with sphinx you can glob them all together then sphinx does some awesome statistical findings based on the string you've passed in and the matches which are resulting from it.

This Link: PHP Sphinx Searching does a great job at walking you through what it would look like and how things work together.

So you aren't really replacing a database; you're just adding a special daemon to it (sphinx) which allows you to create specialized indexes and run your full text searches against it.