Yesterday, I found Sphinx Search and decided to try implementing it in place of the (horrid) MySql Fulltext searching for my Photocore project. After downloading the binaries and indexing a couple million rows of metadata, I was amazed at how well it performs. It indexed all my data in less than a minute (compared to the 30 minutes required by MySql Fulltext) and I haven’t come up with a search that takes longer than 0.005 seconds. I was hooked immediately. So I needed a .NET API because I didn’t want to patch my database server to use the Sphinx plugin.

Source download after the jump.

Download v0.2 source | binaries

Download has no warranties, blah, blah, blah. It’s based on the Java API and is released under the GNU GPL license.

Important Note
It does not have all the features implemented. Most notably, it does not have support for Exceprts. If you modify code to make it work, send it back and I’ll post the updated version here. Or, if I get enough requests to implement it, I might. But my use of Sphinx does not include excerpts, so I didn’t bother at this point.

Other Notes
This is a pretty quick-and-dirty project, I’ll proabably clean it up over time and repost new versions, but for now make sure you test it thoroughly before putting it into production on your own sites. That’s your responsibility…

It is tested against the Sphinx searchd server version 0.9.8-dev running on both linux (ubuntu) and windows (vista) with simple queries only. I didn’t do anything fancy in my queries.

It does not work against 0.9.7 or earlier because those did not support multiple queries. It should work against future versions of Sphinx server. No promises though.

Usage
Super-simple to use after you have a searchd server running with an index. Three lines will do a search for “rose bowl gooley” matching any index (“*”) and will get the second page of results (items 41-80) with a max result count of 10,000 documents.

// set hostname and port defaults
SphinxClient cli = new SphinxClient(hostname, 3312);

// set the pagination params
// (this is page 2, 40 per page, 10000 max)
cli.SetLimits(40, 40, 10000);

// define the query and index
// ("*" means any index)
cli.AddQuery("rose bowl gooley", "*");

// run the query and get the results
SphinxResult[] results = cli.RunQueries();

The SphinxResult object contains an array of SphinxMatches which will provide you with the DocumentId numbers for all matches. Simple as that.

Happy searching!