First of all, I want to apologize to those of you who have had trouble searching your donor database today and yesterday. There was a bug in the search engine that was causing some donors not to come up in the search results, even though they could be found by browsing.
Here’s what happened, if you care for a technical explanation:
It all started when we implemented the Sphinx search engine over the weekend. Sphinx is what’s known as a full-text search engine, which means that it is supposed to make it easy to search for parts of words (or in our case, parts of names) inside big blocks of text. While Donor Tools doesn’t have big blocks of text to search, we do have a lot of information on each donor that needs to be searchable: multiple names, multiple addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. It seemed like a perfect case for full-text search: just index all the donors’ contact information as one big blob, and then search on it.
Turns out it wasn’t so easy. Due to a glitch in the way the indexer was handling aggregate selects, any names that had any part left blank were being indexed as blank. For example, if the middle name field was blank, then the whole name would be blank. Obviously this was not what was intended.
This was definitely not what we wanted to happen during the middle of the work week, so I spent the morning hustling to get this fixed.
Here’s the upshot: We scrapped Sphinx, opting instead for a much simpler system where we query the database directly. As it turns out, dealing with this forced us to streamline the search process a bit. Even without the full-text search engine, searches now run faster and more accurately than before.
One more thing…
And, there’s a minor new feature that made its way into all these bugfixes:
Now, if your search result is empty, and if Donor Tools thinks it can help you refine your search, you’ll get a nice little search tip with a suggestion.
Thanks for bearing with us - we’re constantly working to improve Donor Tools. Don’t forget to send us feedback - we love to hear from you!
