Sphinx 0.9.7 RC1 is now available in Downloads section.

My initial plans to release 0.9.7 in September slipped due to the most trivial reason. There was a number of major bugs uncovered during the beta testing; so most of October was dedicated to fixing those. Anyway, it seems pretty stable now, so it's time for RC1.

As long as its RC1, some things are still missing; most notably, documentation and MySQL SE are not yet upated with all the latest changes.

However, major changes alone (not to mention all the numerous fixes and improvements) should outweigh that documentation and SE lag. Those are, namely:

• multiple per-document attributes support;
• match grouping and per-group counts support;
• search time optimizations (times faster than 0.9.6 in some cases).

As always, I'm looking forward to your feedback, so it's about time to get yourself a copy and try it!