With any growing or evolving database, there comes a time when the limitations of MariaDB's built in, full text-searching functionality becomes more of a hindrance than its convenience is worth. At that point, another method is needed to efficiently index and search through our textual data. This is where Sphinx comes in.

There are actually two parts to Sphinx: an external daemon called Sphinx that does the work of building and maintaining the search index using that we use to search our data, and a storage engine component called SphinxSE that is part of MariaDB, which the Sphinx daemon uses to talk to MariaDB. The recipes in this chapter will cover setting up and using both these.