is a very powerful and popular free open source full-text search engine. At the end of October 2008, Sphinx 0.9.8.1 was released.

During the summer, Vlad Khorsun and Pierre Yager made a patch for Sphinx, to have it support Firebird. Now, with the blessing of its author, Andrew Aksyonoff, they want to make their patch and Windows binaries publicly available for you to try out.

Whilst it is still far from real "full text search" support in Firebird, Vlad and Pierre believe it is a first little step in that direction. Sphinx support can be added to Firebird later, using the proposed external engines feature.

For now people can use Sphinx's FTS capabilities with Firebird databases using any existing Sphinx clients (for PHP, Ruby, C/C++ etc).

Release Date	File Name	Size	Description
November 02, 2008	firebird.src.patch	15 KB	Changes to Sphinx sources
November 02, 2008	firebird.linux.patch	5 KB	Changes to make process on Linux
November 02, 2008	firebird.win.patch	20 KB	Changes to Windows build system (MSVC8)
November 02, 2008	sphinx-0.9.8.1.Firebird.Win32.zip	2 MB	Windows binaries built with the Firebird patch (32-bit document identifiers)
November 02, 2008	sphinx-0.9.8.1.Firebird.Win32.USE_64BIT.zip	2 MB	Windows binaries built with the Firebird patch (64-bit document identifiers)
November 02, 2008	readme.txt	2 KB	Text file containing installation and usage notes