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

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

Answer 2

They're using sphinx for that