Today we're releasing
Sphinx 3.7.1, and having skipped a post about Sphinx 3.6.1 back in October 2023, let me highlight the top features from both 3.6 and 3.7 releases. Since 3.5, we added:
- vector indexes for ANN searches
- percolation indexes for "reverse" searches
- unified attr_xxx syntax for index schemas in configs
- indexer-side joins over SQL and CSV
- user authentication
REPLACE ... KEEP
clause searchd decode
command to decode API crash dumps
There also are
many other "smaller" features, improvements, and bugfixes as well. Say, one of my personal favorites is the special base64 syntax for putting INT8 vectors into Sphinx. Quite small feature indeed, but helped us shave off over 200 GB from one of our busier databases, and save on reindexing time. Nice! But let's overview those top-7 features (chosen according to team vote rather my personal preferences, so must be more interesting than that base64 bit).