Sphinx can be used either as a stand-alone server or as a storage engine ("SphinxSE") for the MySQL family of databases.

Official implementations of the API are available for PHP, Java, Perl, Ruby and Python languages.

Sphinx can also provide a special storage engine for MariaDB and MySQL databases.

This allows those MySQL, MariaDB to communicate with Sphinx's searchd to run queries and obtain results.

Full-text fields are the resulting content that is indexed by Sphinx; they can be (quickly) searched for keywords.

Assume for example that you're running a price comparison or an auction site with many different products categories.

[19] Unlike Sphinx, Manticore continues to be released as open source under version 3 of the GPL.