Friendfeed schemaless data in MYSQL

Question

I read an article around schema-less database which sounds cool. (http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql)

But what isn't clear to me is how do they run search queries on this data? Since the data is in JSON format how do we look for it?

Answer 1

For attributes that are needed for filtering / searching, they are first indexed using a separate table. This makes the data more transparent.

Let me quote what this post says: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

Indexes are stored in separate tables. To create a new index, we create a new table storing the attributes we want to index on all of our database shards.

Answer 2

I'd imagine they have a separate search engine with its own index - probably not even in MySQL, something like Solr.

Answer 3

They're using sphinx for that