2012-01-17T21:54:19-08:00 http://davedash.com/ Dave Dash dd+atom1@davedash.com 2010-04-21T00:00:00-07:00 http://davedash.com/2010/04/21/alphabetical-sorting-in-sphinx <p>Sphinx 0.9.9 is great at searching full text, but treating actual strings as attributes takes some work.</p> <p>Initially I employed the strategy of indexing my full text fields <em>and</em> storing them as attributes. E.g.:</p> <pre><code>sql_query = SELECT name, name AS name_ord FROM documents sql_attr_str2ordinal = name_ord </code></pre> <p>This stores each attribute in lexical order. Meaning if your name's are Apple, Aardvark, Button, Choco-room they would be given the ordinal 2, 1, 3, 4 respectively.</p> <p>However, this is case-insensitive. So trying this approach:</p> <pre><code>sql_query = SELECT name, UPPER(name) AS name_ord FROM documents sql_attr_str2ordinal = name_ord </code></pre> <p>Will allow for case-insensitive alphabetical sorting in Sphinx.</p>