Peter Zaitsev, a Senior Performance Engineer at MySQL, recently let me know about Andrew Aksyonoff, an open source developer who has written a high performance FULLTEXT indexer and query engine called Sphinx. While not (yet!) a pluggable MySQl storage engine, Sphinx does include native support for querying MySQL databases. A while back, Peter blogged about Sphinx. I’m extremely impressed with Sphinx’s performance characteristics, and I’ll be interviewing Andrew sometime in this coming week, so look out for the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. I’m very interested to hear Andrew’s thoughts on the new MySQL 5.1 Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture and how he envisions a roadmap for his project.

You can read more about MySQL’s FULLTEXT capability and participate in discussions on the dedicated FULLTEXT forum

Keep an eye out for interviews coming up on MySQL’s Developer Zone. We’ve got loads of cool content coming your way, including interviews with various Open Source projects and the MySQL User’s Conference speakers.