maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Arjen Lentz <arjen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Monty

On 02/08/2010, at 6:54 PM, Michael Widenius wrote:
> Walter> regardless of wether or not MariaDB supports it, I'd  
> recommend going
> Walter> with Sphinx or Solr instead. These are separate easy to manage
> Walter> programs that make your fulltext search capabilities _much_  
> better,
> Walter> faster and lighter.
>
> Agree that for sophisticated indexing Sphinx (and maybe Solr, but I
> don't know that one that well) is a a better choice.

We have clients using Sphinx, Xapian and Solr.
Choice often depends on the development language/environment used,  
Java apps would tend towards Solr.


> That said, if you have a working setup and MyISAM/Aria does the job,
> it's probably ok to continue using them. (Don't break a working  
> setup :)


Real world feedback: almost all clients we have that use FULLTEXT need  
to not use it, because
 - they need the tables to be InnoDB for transactional/consistency  
reasons; since Aria is not transactional it's not an option.
 - FULLTEXT performance both for inserts and selects on larger  
datasets makes it unsuitable.

So they have real problems, that need solving.
Most have addressed by adapting the app for Sphinx (and sometimes  
Xapian), in many cases using the PHP or other APIs, sometimes using  
the Sphinx engine in the 5.0 OurDelta builds because they want to be  
able to join the results onto other tables. They all report happiness  
and not having to spend a lot of development effort to getting it to  
work and actually making a big difference in overall app performance.

So my conclusion
 - no care for Aria. PBXT is higher on the interest list because it's  
transactional and can participate in a transaction (XA) with InnoDB  
making it consistent.
 - no care for FULLTEXT
 - Sphinx engine in MariaDB 5.2 is important, because users of 5.0  
OurDelta have found that useful; some are actually waiting for MariaDB  
5.2 so they can upgrade.

By 'no care' I mean "in my opinion it's not worthwhile putting further  
development effort into these things, there are more worthwhile things"
For Aria I've noted this before, but I'm happy to explicitly stick  
FULLTEXT on the same list.
thanks

Regards,
Arjen.
--
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Exceptional Services for MySQL at a fixed budget.

Follow our blog at http://openquery.com/blog/
OurDelta: packages for MySQL and MariaDB @ http://ourdelta.org