Fulltext Search with InnoDB

Question

I'm developing a high-volume web application, where part of it is a MySQL database of discussion posts that will need to grow to 20M+ rows, smoothly.

I was originally planning on using MyISAM for the tables (for the built-in fulltext search capabilities), but the thought of the entire table being locked due to a single write operation makes me shutter. Row-level locks make so much more sense (not to mention InnoDB's other speed advantages when dealing with huge tables). So, for this reason, I'm pretty determined to use InnoDB.

The problem is... InnoDB doesn't have built-in fulltext search capabilities.

Should I go with a third-party search system? Like Lucene(c++) / Sphinx? Do any of you database ninjas have any suggestions/guidance? LinkedIn's zoie (based off Lucene) looks like the best option at the moment... having been built around realtime capabilities (which is pretty critical for my application.) I'm a little hesitant to commit yet without some insight...

(FYI: going to be on EC2 with high-memory rigs, using PHP to serve the frontend)

Answer 1

Along with the general phasing out of MyISAM, InnoDB full-text search (FTS) is finally available in MySQL 5.6.4 release.

Lots of juicy details at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-index.html.

While other engines have lots of different features, this one is InnoDB, so it's native (which means there's an upgrade path), and that makes it a worthwhile option.