Two Sphinx-related tidbits:

Riddle

Riddle now has a tag in SVN for the 0.9.8-r909 release of Sphinx - not that there were really any functional changes compared to r871, besides the two extra match modes (Full Scan and Extended 2 - the latter isn’t going to hang around for long anyway).

Thinking Sphinx

As well as supporting the above version of Sphinx, I’ve now added some brief documentation to Thinking Sphinx that discusses attributes, sorting and delta indexes. To summarise kinda-briefly:

Attributes

Attributes are defined in the define_index block as follows:

define_index do |index|
  index.has.created_at
  index.has.updated_at
  # Field definitions go here
end

They can only be from the indexed model (not associations), and in line with Sphinx’s limitations, must be either integers, floats or timestamps.

Sorting

Ties in closely with attributes - as that’s all Sphinx will let you order by. Use it in the same way as you would in a find call:

Invoice.search :conditions => "expensive", :order => "created_at DESC"

Same approach works for the :include parameter (although this has nothing to do with Sphinx itself).

Delta Indexes

Delta indexes track changes to model records between proper indexes (ie: from the rake task thinking_sphinx:index) - all they require is a boolean field in the model’s table called delta, and for delta indexing to be enabled as follows:

define_index do |index|
  index.delta = true
  # Fields and attributes go here
end

The one catch - at this point, delta indexes are one step off current, as they get indexed before the current transaction to the database is committed. This will get better soon, thanks to some help from Joost Hietbrink and his colleagues at YelloYello

• once I find some free time, I’ll get that working much more neatly.