Easy to use open source fast database for search
Manticore Search is an easy-to-use, open-source, and fast database designed for search. It is a great alternative to Elasticsearch.
Introduction
What distinguishes Manticore from other solutions is:
It's very fast and therefore more cost-efficient than alternatives. In the current reproducible benchmarks, Manticore Search 27.1.5 is:
Results are workload-specific; use the linked dashboard to select the queries that match your workload.
⚡ Multi-threaded query execution and efficient query parallelization use all CPU cores for low response times.
🔎 Full-text search works seamlessly with both small and large datasets.
🧩 Hybrid search combines full-text and vector retrieval in a single query for better relevance.
💬 Conversational search lets existing vectorized tables answer questions with KNN retrieval, conversation history, and LLM-backed responses through SQL CALL CHAT or the HTTP JSON /search endpoint.
🏎️ Row-wise storage provides fast performance for small, medium, and large datasets.
🗄️ Columnar storage, powered by the Manticore Columnar Library, handles datasets too large to fit in RAM.
📇 Automatic secondary indexes use the PGM-index (Piecewise Geometric Model index) for efficient mapping between indexed keys and memory locations.
🧠 Cost-based query optimization uses indexed-data statistics to select efficient execution plans.
🧮 SQL-first and MySQL-compatible: use SQL as the native syntax with your preferred MySQL client.
🔌 Official clients for PHP, Python, Python asyncio JavaScript, Typescript, Java, Elixir, Go, and Rust make integration easy.
🌐 HTTP JSON API and Elasticsearch-compatible writes support versatile data and schema management.
🧱 Sharded tables transparently distribute reads and writes across physical shards on one node or across a replication cluster.
🔐 Built-in authentication and authorization secure MySQL, HTTP/HTTPS, distributed remote agents, and replication-related operations with users, bearer tokens, and fine-grained permissions.
🪶 C++ performance and a small footprint: Manticore Search starts quickly and uses around 40MB RSS for an empty instance.
⚡ Real-time inserts make newly added or updated documents immediately accessible.
🎓 Interactive courses at play.manticoresearch.com make learning easier.
🔄 Virtually synchronous multi-master replication uses Galera and includes load balancing.
🔗 Data synchronization supports sources such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC, XML, and CSV.
🛡️ Safe writes: while not fully ACID-compliant, Manticore supports isolated transactions and binary logging.
💾 Backup and recovery include manticore-backup, SQL BACKUP, and S3-compatible backup/restore support.
Craigslist, Socialgist, PubChem, Rozetka and many others use Manticore for efficient searching and stream filtering.
More features
- Full-text search and relevance:
- Other search capabilities:
- Natural language processing (NLP):
- Stream filtering:
- High-availability:
- Security:
- Data safety:
- Data storages:
- row-wise - requires more RAM, provides faster performance
- columnar - requires less RAM, still provides decent performance, but lower than the row-wise storage for some kinds of queries
- docstore - doesn't require RAM at all, but allows only fetching original value, not sorting/grouping/filtering
- Performance optimizations:
- Secondary indexes
- Cost-based optimizer determines the most efficient execution plan of a search query
- Data types:
- full-text field - inverted index
- UUID document IDs for real-time tables
- int, bigint and float numeric fields in row-wise and columnar fashion
- multi-value attributes (array)
- string and JSON
- on-disk "stored" for key-value purpose
- Integrations:
Installation
Quick install
For Linux and macOS with Homebrew, use the one-line installer:
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh
It detects Debian/Ubuntu/Mint, RHEL/CentOS/Amazon/Oracle/Fedora-like RPM systems, and macOS with Homebrew. It configures the official Manticore repository when needed, installs manticore, starts the service when supported, and prints the result.
Common commands:
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh -s help
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh -s list-versions
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh -s version 25.0.0
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh -s dev
curl https://manticoresearch.com | sh -s upgrade
Docker
Docker image is available on Docker Hub.
To experiment with Manticore Search in Docker just run:
docker run --name manticore --rm -d manticoresearch/manticore && until docker logs manticore 2>&1 | grep -q "accepting connections"; do sleep 1; done && docker exec -it manticore mysql && docker stop manticore
You can then: create a table, add data and run searches. For example:
create table movies(title text, year int) morphology='stem_en' html_strip='1' stopwords='en';
insert into movies(title, year) values ('The Seven Samurai', 1954), ('Bonnie and Clyde', 1954), ('Reservoir Dogs', 1992), ('Airplane!', 1980), ('Raging Bull', 1980), ('Groundhog Day', 1993), ('<a href="http://google.com/">Jurassic Park</a>', 1993), ('Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off', 1986);
select highlight(), year from movies where match('the dog');
select highlight(), year from movies where match('days') facet year;
select * from movies where match('google');
Note that upon exiting the MySQL client, the Manticore container will be stopped and removed, resulting in no saved data, so use this way only for testing / sandboxing purposes.
Read the full instruction for the docker image for more details including our recommendations on running it in production.
Manual package installation
If you prefer explicit package-manager commands, use the manual instructions below or see the downloads page.
RPM repo for RHEL/CentOS/Amazon/Oracle/Fedora-like Linux
sudo yum install https://repo.manticoresearch.com/manticore-repo.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install manticore
or use dnf when available:
sudo dnf install https://repo.manticoresearch.com/manticore-repo.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install manticore
APT repo for Ubuntu/Debian/Mint
wget https://repo.manticoresearch.com/manticore-repo.noarch.deb
sudo apt install ./manticore-repo.noarch.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install manticore
Homebrew on macOS
brew install manticoresoftware/tap/manticoresearch manticoresoftware/tap/manticore-extra
Windows
For WSL/WSL2, use the Linux installer inside the WSL distribution. For native Windows, see the Windows installation instructions.
Documentation and community sites
Third-party integrations
How we can support you
Should your company require any help - we provide full-cycle services:
- Audit
- Support
- Consulting
- Development
- Training
More details here
❤️ How you can support Manticore Search
Manticore Search is an Open Source project with development made possible by support from our core team, contributors, and sponsors. Building premium Open Source software is not easy. If you would like to make sure Manticore Search stays free, here is how you can help the project:
License
Manticore Search is distributed under GPLv3 or later. Manticore Search uses and re-distributes other open-source components. Please check the component licenses directory for details.
Manticore Search 是一个开源搜索数据库，支持全文搜索、向量搜索和混合搜索，具备实时索引和 SQL 支持。它定位为比 Elasticsearch 更快、性价比更高的替代方案。