Sphinx 2.0.2 Beta is released, Sphinx Users Conference in December

My friends at Sphinx Technologies have finally released new beta of Sphinx – Sphinx 2.0.2. It includes about 6 months of development and includes over 30 new features and tons of bug fixes. I’m happy to see how Sphinx 2.0 is shaping up a lot of rough corners are being polished and I’m hopeful we will see very solid Stable Sphinx 2.0 within next 3 to 6 months. In fact Sphinx 2.0.3-rc is promised within 1 month.

What MySQL Users will find interesting in this release is a lot of work on SphinxQL the Sphinx’s language similar to SQL. Now it support number of functions such as SET NAMES which make it possible to connect to Sphinx as if it were MySQL Server with more advanced connectors which issue such commands when they set up connection.

Sphinx Team also announced Sphinx Users Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia on December 4th. This is going to be free Russian Speaking event.

This is the second Sphinx event in Russia and I really wish there would be and International Sphinx Conference somewhere in US or Western Europe. I hope we’ll see something like it in 2012.

Another thought – with Innodb Full Text Search coming up in MySQL 5.6 and Claimed to be faster than MyISAM’s I really would like to see some benchmarks comparing it to Sphinx, especially to its Real Time indexes. Some easy to understand feature comparison table would also be helpful as in many cases people use Sphinx not because it is faster – speed might not be the main thing on smaller collections but its various full text search features.