Sphinx – open-source Search Engine

Sphinx 3.8.1 released

Today we're releasing Sphinx 3.8.1. It's been a busy year (again), so 3.8 packs more than 35 new features, and numerous bugfixes. My personal features top-3 is this.

• we implemented our own HNSW and SQ vector indexes (and added experimental FAISS HNSW too, but very likely that one will be dropped)
• we integrated BLIS and public builds now fully support vector indexes (but only expect proper performance on amd64 Linux)
• and personal favorite, arbitrary WHERE conditions are now supported (extremely overdue syntax sugar)

Other major changes include full support for JSON updates, secondary index read merging (ie. indexed WHERE foo=123 OR bar=456 queries), and distributed request hedging. Smaller changes are numerous so I won't even try. Instead, grab the binaries, read the docs (massively updated too), play around, have fun!

Sphinx 3.7.1 released

Today we're releasing Sphinx 3.7.1, and having skipped a post about Sphinx 3.6.1 back in October 2023, let me highlight the top features from both 3.6 and 3.7 releases. Since 3.5, we added:

• vector indexes for ANN searches
• percolation indexes for "reverse" searches
• unified attr_xxx syntax for index schemas in configs
• indexer-side joins over SQL and CSV
• user authentication
• REPLACE ... KEEP clause
• searchd decode command to decode API crash dumps

There also are many other "smaller" features, improvements, and bugfixes as well. Say, one of my personal favorites is the special base64 syntax for putting INT8 vectors into Sphinx. Quite small feature indeed, but helped us shave off over 200 GB from one of our busier databases, and save on reindexing time. Nice! But let's overview those top-7 features (chosen according to team vote rather my personal preferences, so must be more interesting than that base64 bit).

Sphinx 3.5.1 released

We are starting 2023 off by making Sphinx 3.5.1 available, with about 30 new features compared to 3.4.1 released mid-2021 (it has been a little while), and almost a hundred changes and fixes. We voted internally for the top-3 features but ended up choosing top-6 to highlight on the front page. They are as follows.

Sphinx 3.3.1 released

We have just made Sphinx 3.3.1 available, with a few more updates from 3.2 posted back in January. Two most notable new features specific to 3.3 are UDF call batching and multi-threaded index loading, though as always there are more; here is the changelog for 3.3. Read on for a few highlights.

Sphinx meetup in Moscow on Feb 28

Just wanted to post a quick note that our colleagues from SuperJob.ru will be hosting a Sphinx meetup in their Moscow, Russia office in 3 weeks from now, on February 28. As usual the attendance is free but you gotta register, so well, if you're interetsed, see you there :)

Sphinx 3.1.1 released

And Sphinx updates again. Enters Sphinx 3.1.1, not hugely different from 3.0.x series on one hand, but on the other one, with a few new features and (beware!) enough breaking legacy SphinxAPI changes that they warranted a version bump. The highlights are as follows.

Sphinx 3.0.3 released

Time for a bugfix spring update. Enters Sphinx 3.0.3, somewhat faster (upto 2x compared to 3.0.2) and more stable. Read on for a little more, or just update now, it will be worth it.