ERROR: index 'products': too many string attributes (current index format allows up to 4 GB)

Question

Got this when tried to index table in database with 25GB of data. Sphinx contains index declaration with following fields:

sql_field_string    = field_indexer #some keywords
sql_field_string    = product_name
sql_field_string    = description
sql_attr_float      = price
sql_field_string    = product_url
sql_field_string    = image_url
sql_field_string    = sku
sql_attr_uint       = merchant_id
sql_attr_uint       = network_id     

All of them must be indexed.
How solve this problem?

Multiple indexes or distributed indexes are really painful solutions.

Answer 1

There is no solution for your problem for now.

There are several workarounds:

• use distributed index
• make your attrs full text fields (but it makes them "unselectable")
• search in sphinx and query to database for this attrs (2 queries with all disadvantages)

You can choose less painful workaround or switch to another search engine...