The slides from the Sphinx talk that I gave a month ago at MySQL UC 2008 had already been available from O'Reilly for some time. However, I've just wrapped up the slides with the talk itself. The resulting article combines both basic overview and some of the advanced stuff on the searching internals; so I hope it should be an interesting read for everybody. Here's the article in Word format (131 KB) and PDF format (202 KB), and for completeness, here are the slides in PPT format (638 KB) (they are embedded in the article).

I'll also be giving a talk on Sphinx at PHPconf 2008 Russia in Moscow (on May 30th), so if you're speaking Russian and interested in Sphinx, catch me there.

Most of the April was spent conferencing so there's been less work on Sphinx than usual (and no updates on the site at all). However we had written some code in the meantime anyway, mostly in 0.9.9 branch. There were a few fixes in 0.9.8 since RC2 but not really much; so I am planning to finish the fixing and roll out 0.9.8-release out within a couple of weeks. Alpha version of 0.9.9 will be made available in a few days after that.