columnar VS manticoresearch-php

If you use our Manticore Columnar Library, which is highly recommended, secondary indexes are now ON by default. After their introduction in the previous major release they were significantly improved and we now believe having them enabled by default makes sense for most users. There’s also a new command ALTER TABLE table_name REBUILD SECONDARY to rebuild your secondary indexes, e.g. when you upgrade from a previous version.

Speaking about the other differences, the most important is probably the same as if we compare Manticore with Typesense: MeiliSearch isn't supposed to be used in a big data scenario. They say that the max index size is 100 GB and that 8.6MB dataset when indexed by MeiliSearch takes 300+ MB of RAM . Manticore Search for example is used by Craigslist that would probably go broke if they had to spend 300MB of RAM for each 9MB of data. And we made it even better when we developed the columnar storage.

In Manticore 5 we addded Fast fetching for attributes backed by Manticore Columnar Library: queries like select * from are now much faster than previously, especially if there are many fields in the schema.

We already have a beta version ready and here are some first results comparing Manticore Columnar Library + Manticore Search vs Elasticsearch on the same dataset as above (excluding full-text queries, i.e. mostly grouping queries):

We won't plunge into the deep end of the Manticore Search Client for PHP here, but if you're itching to give it a whirl, check out their repository at Manticore Search PHP Client.

Even easier than using the JSON over HTTP is to to use a client for a specific programming language your application is written in. We've implemented new clients for php, python, java, javascript, elixir, go. Most of them are based on the new JSON interface and their code is generated automatically, allowing us to add new features to the clients much faster.