yep sphinx is indeed that faster.. i used it on wikipedia dumps and i was lyk shocked to see the performance difference. It will be awesome to see such improvements in drizzle!
Comment: Guidance for MySQL Optimizer Developers
Clint, I think Drizzle is moving in right direction with this. And NDB (MySQL … parsing and picking optimizer plan when transaction is predictable and performance critical.
Post: Report from OSCON 2008
… note the conference is not as much backend and high performance focused as MySQL Conference or even Velocity, though this year… on OSCON – the biggest one actually came somewhat outside – the Drizzle – MySQL “community fork” was surely the biggest splash on the…

