We’ve been pretty busy lately on a number of cool new features (again),
and an alpha will take some more time, so I thought it’s about time
for a sneak peak into 0.9.10, as well as few other things.

The most major change is unarguably string attributes support.
Strings are intentionally stored in RAM, for speed. On-disk blobs are
considered in the roadmap but not yet planned. Currently strings can only
be used for storage, ie. you can fetch them, but not yet sort nor group
on them. However both sorting and grouping is perfectly technically possible,
and will be implemented at some point (enters SET NAMES).

Second-best one is in my opinion common subtree cache. It lets searchd
identify common query subparts and cache them within a query batch. So if you’re
searching for “john connor rocks” and “john connor sucks” in the same single query
batch, searchd will only search for “john connor” once, and reuse the partial result.
The feature’s currently pre-alpha, but preliminary testing already shows 2x-4x
improvement in some production scenarios.

Other forthcoming features include index precaching progress on searchd
startup, some work on rankers, query-based snippets generation, new “blended”
character class that gets indexed both as a valid character and as
a separator (think of & in AT&T); support for hitless indexes, etc.
So it’s going to be cool new alpha again.

As of 0.9.9 stable branch, a bunch of bugfixes was committed since 0.9.9-rc2
release, currently available via Google Code
public SVN mirror. No super-major affect-everyone bugs had been spotted yet, so the plan’s
to give it another round of fixing in a couple of weeks and then declare it release.

Downloads and Powered page are redesigned now, should be more usable. Everyone who
submitted the sites for Powered in the recent months, I’m sorry it’s taking
so very long to process your submissions, but unfortunately we seem to have
way too much stuff on our hands and just not enough hands to handle it all.
Your submissions are not lost forever and will be posted.

Last but not least, Sphinx made it into the second and final phase of Sourceforge
Awards 2009, in SysAdmins and Enterprise categories. (We almost made it in
Developers too.. but with an “almost”, alas.) Voting ends by July 20th,
so please vote for us, bring all your friends, and spread the link!

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