Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial licensing is also available upon request. Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full-text search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data source drivers support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL, or PostgreSQL, or from a pipe in a custom XML format. Adding new drivers is designed to be as easy as possible. Search API native ported to PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, and also available as a plug-gable MySQL storage engine. API is very lightweight so porting it to new language is known to take a few hours. As for the name, Sphinx is an acronym which is officially decoded as SQL Phrase Index. Yes, I know about CMU's Sphinx project.