Preface

This manual provides reference information for Oracle Text. Use it as a reference for creating Oracle Text indexes, for issuing Oracle Text queries, for presenting documents, and for using the Oracle Text PL/SQL packages.

This preface contains these topics:

Audience

Oracle Text Reference is intended for an Oracle Text application developer or a system administrator responsible for maintaining the Oracle Text system.

To use this document, you need experience with the Oracle relational database management system, SQL, SQL*Plus, and PL/SQL. See the documentation provided with your hardware and software for additional information.

If you are unfamiliar with the Oracle RDBMS and related tools, read Chapter 1, "An Introduction to the Oracle Server", in Oracle9i Concepts. The chapter is a comprehensive introduction to the concepts and terminology used throughout Oracle documentation.

Organization

This document contains:

Chapter 1, "SQL Statements and Operators"

This chapter describes the SQL statements and operators you can use with Oracle Text.

Chapter 2, "Indexing"

This chapter describes the indexing types you can use to create an Oracle Text index.

Chapter 3, "CONTAINS Query Operators"

This chapter describes the operators you can use in CONTAINS queries.

Chapter 4, "Special Characters in Queries"

This chapter describes the special characters you can use in CONTAINS queries.

Chapter 5, "CTX_ADM Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_ADM PL/SQL package.

Chapter 7, "CTX_DDL Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_DDL PL/SQL package. Use this package for maintaining your index.

Chapter 8, "CTX_DOC Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_DOC PL/SQL package. Use this package for document services such as document presentation.

Chapter 9, "CTX_OUTPUT Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_OUTPUT PL/SQL package. Use this package to manage your index error log files.

Chapter 10, "CTX_QUERY Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_QUERY PL/SQL package. Use this package to manage queries such as to count hits and to generate query explain plan information.

Chapter 11, "CTX_REPORT"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_REPORT PL/SQL package. Use this package to create various index reports.

Chapter 12, "CTX_THES Package"

This chapter describes the procedures in the CTX_THES PL/SQL package. Use this package to manage your thesaurus.

Chapter 13, "CTX_ULEXER Package"

This chapter describes the data types in the CTX_ULEXER PL/SQL package. Use this package with the user defined lexer.

Chapter 14, "Executables"

This chapter describes the supplied executables for Oracle Text including ctxload, the thesaurus loading program, and ctxkbtc, the knowledge base compiler.

Appendix A, "Result Tables"

This appendix describes the result tables for some of the procedures in CTX_DOC, CTX_QUERY, and CTX_THES packages.

Appendix B, "Supported Document Formats"

This appendix describes the supported document formats that can be filtered with the Inso filter for indexing.

Appendix C, "Loading Examples"

This appendix provides some basic examples for populating a text table.

Appendix D, "Supplied Stoplists"

This appendix describes the supplied stoplist for each supported language.

Appendix E, "Alternate Spelling Conventions"

This appendix describes the alternate spelling conventions used for German, Danish, and Swedish.

Appendix F, "Scoring Algorithm"

This appendix describes the scoring algorithm used for word queries.

Appendix G, "Views"

This appendix describes the Oracle Text views.

Appendix H, "Stopword Transformations"

This appendix describes stopword transformations.

Appendix I, "English Knowledge Base Category Hierarchy"

This appendix describes the supplied English Knowledge Base.

Conventions

This section describes the conventions used in the text and code examples of this documentation set. It describes:

Conventions in Text

We use various conventions in text to help you more quickly identify special terms. The following table describes those conventions and provides examples of their use.

Convention	Meaning	Example
Bold	Bold typeface indicates terms that are defined in the text or terms that appear in a glossary, or both.	The C datatypes such as ub4, sword, or OCINumber are valid. When you specify this clause, you create an index-organized table.
Italics	Italic typeface indicates query terms, book titles, emphasis, syntax clauses, or placeholders.	The following query searches for oracle. Oracle9i Concepts You can specify the parallel_clause. Run `U``old_release``.SQL` where old_release refers to the release you installed prior to upgrading.
UPPERCASE monospace (fixed-width font)	Uppercase monospace typeface indicates elements supplied by the system. Such elements include parameters, privileges, datatypes, RMAN keywords, SQL keywords, SQL*Plus or utility commands, packages and methods, as well as system-supplied column names, database objects and structures, user names, and roles.	You can specify this clause only for a `NUMBER` column. You can back up the database using the `BACKUP` command. Query the `TABLE_NAME` column in the `USER_TABLES` data dictionary view. Specify the `ROLLBACK_SEGMENTS` parameter. Use the `DBMS_STATS`.`GENERATE_STATS` procedure.
lowercase monospace (fixed-width font)	Lowercase monospace typeface indicates executables and sample user-supplied elements. Such elements include computer and database names, net service names, and connect identifiers, as well as user-supplied database objects and structures, column names, packages and classes, user names and roles, program units, and parameter values.	Enter `sqlplus` to open SQL*Plus. The `department_id`, `department_name`, and `location_id` columns are in the `hr.departments` table. Set the `QUERY_REWRITE_ENABLED` initialization parameter to `true.` Connect as `oe` user.

Conventions in Code Examples

Code examples illustrate SQL, PL/SQL, SQL*Plus, or other command-line statements. They are displayed in a monospace (fixed-width) font and separated from normal text as shown in this example:

SELECT username FROM dba_users WHERE username = 'MIGRATE';

The following table describes typographic conventions used in code examples and provides examples of their use.

Convention	Meaning	Example
[ ]	Brackets enclose one or more optional items. Do not enter the brackets.	`DECIMAL (digits [ , precision ])`
{ }	Braces enclose two or more items, one of which is required. Do not enter the braces.	`{ENABLE \| DISABLE}`
\|	A vertical bar represents a choice of two or more options within brackets or braces. Enter one of the options. Do not enter the vertical bar.	`{ENABLE \| DISABLE}` `[COMPRESS \| NOCOMPRESS]`
`...`	Horizontal ellipsis points indicate either: That we have omitted parts of the code that are not directly related to the example That you can repeat a portion of the code	`CREATE TABLE ... AS subquery;` `SELECT col1, col2, ... , col``n` `FROM employees;`
. . .	Vertical ellipsis points indicate that we have omitted several lines of code not directly related to the example.
Other notation	You must enter symbols other than brackets, braces, vertical bars, and ellipsis points as it is shown.	`acctbal NUMBER(11,2);` `acct CONSTANT NUMBER(4) := 3;`
`Italics`	Italicized text indicates variables for which you must supply particular values.	`CONNECT SYSTEM/``system_password`
`UPPERCASE`	Uppercase typeface indicates elements supplied by the system. We show these terms in uppercase in order to distinguish them from terms you define. Unless terms appear in brackets, enter them in the order and with the spelling shown. However, because these terms are not case sensitive, you can enter them in lowercase.	`SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;` `SELECT * FROM USER_TABLES;` `DROP TABLE hr.employees;`
`lowercase`	Lowercase typeface indicates programmatic elements that you supply. For example, lowercase indicates names of tables, columns, or files.	`SELECT last_name, employee_id FROM employees;` `sqlplus hr/hr`

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle Corporation is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For additional information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at

http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

JAWS, a Windows screen reader, may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, JAWS may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.