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

Take a look at the solution I propose here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22531268/543814

Your friend names are probably short, and your query looks simple enough. You can probably afford to store all suffixes, perhaps in a separate table, pointing back to the original table to get the full name.

This would give you fast infix search at the cost of a little bit more storage space.

Furthermore, to avoid finding 'Marianne' when searching for 'Ann', consider:

• Using case-sensitive search. (Fragile; may break if your users enter their names or their search queries with incorrect capitalization.)
• After the query, filtering your search results further, requiring word boundaries around the search term (e.g. regex \bAnn\b).