Sphinx and/or Thinking Sphinx that

Thinking Sphinx PDF at Peepcode

A quick note to let anyone using (or interested in using) Sphinx and/or Thinking Sphinx that my Peepcode PDF has just been published, and contains a wealth of information on how to mix Sphinx with ActiveRecord (via Rails or Merb).

It’s been great working with Geoffrey Grosenbach to get this written up, and I’m pretty stoked to see the final results - hopefully others will enjoy it as well.

Also, a massive thank you to all the contributors to Thinking Sphinx - it wouldn’t be quite so cool if it wasn’t for all the patches (facilitated by GitHub’s forking).

Jeff left a comment on 28 Oct, 2008:

I’m excited about thinking sphinx, but I’ve never been able to get past an issue where a table whose id is a varchar refuses to be indexed… it throws “WARNING: duplicate document ids found” and refuses to index properly. I tried coding around the sql_query * 1 + 0 AS `id` bit on a hunch, but that doesn’t seem to solve it.

Any advice? I’m otherwise ready to shell out the cash for this pdf.

jeff left a comment on 28 Oct, 2008:

I should note that the varchar ids are unique in the database.

Jeff left a comment on 28 Oct, 2008:

So it appears that this is a limitation of sphinx itself. Sorry for the troubles. Even sorrier that I can’t use sphinx on this project.

pat left a comment on 29 Oct, 2008:

Hi Jeff

Yup, unfortunately Sphinx requires integer IDs. Sorry it’s not a solution that’ll work for you.

tashfeen left a comment on 20 Dec, 2008:

i get the following error when trying to start sphinx and the file noted there is not being generated. permission on the directory is for all.

(in C:/ror/rails_apps/drug)
searchd —config C:/ror/rails_apps/drug/config/development.sphinx.conf
Failed to start searchd daemon. Check C:/ror/rails_apps/drug/log/searchd.log.

pat left a comment on 21 Dec, 2008:

Not quite sure what could be stopping development.sphinx.conf from generating… probably best to continue this discussion on the google group

tashfeen left a comment on 22 Dec, 2008:

ok, treid there too but no help yet. let me know if you come up with anything. i am developing on windows if that may help…

Jeff left a comment on 6 Mar, 2009:

Not trying to blog spam here, but for those who get here via google: Don’t be discouraged by the integer primary key issue, it can be overcome. See http://blog.semanticart.com/comparing_thinking_sphinx_and_acts_as_ferret_for_full-text_indexing_in_rails