The most popular way to find information is to enter a word or phrase
and perform a search. This page contains the following information on searching:
The List of All Books lists the titles of all books in the Oracle9iAS documentation library. For each book you can view the table of contents, index, and PDF files. You can also perform a search within a specific book.
The Search in box lets you choose a subset of books from among the most widely used books and search within those books only. You can choose to search in all books, books with administrative information only, and books with application development information only.
You can enter the words AND, OR, and NOT in your search terms to
perform boolean searches.
- To search for a multi-word phrase, enter it with no special notation -- no quotation marks or boolean operators.
- Use
AND when there are too many matches. This will only return matches that contain all of the search terms.
- Use
OR when there are not enough matches. This will return matches that contain any of the search terms.
- Use
NOT when you want to exclude specific matches.
- To search for the words "and", "or", and "not", include the phrase that contains them within braces: { }.
For example, here are some search terms you might enter:
create tablespace
java AND xml
application server OR middle tier
stored procedure NOT java
{AND operator}
By default, all search terms are surrounded by wildcards on both sides.
For example, searching for intermedia also finds intermediate.
If you include typical wildcard characters such as %, _, *, and ? in your
search terms, they are interpreted as literal characters rather than wildcards.
You can disable the wildcard expansion by surrounding the search term with braces. For example, {intermedia} does not match intermediate.
By default, the search results begin as a list of books, showing how
many matching topics are in each one. You can use the book titles to help
decide which book is appropriate, or use the number of matching topics to
find the books with the most information.
The search results are always ordered in this way:
- Any results from the most widely used books, such as the Oracle9i Application Server Application Developer's Guide and Oracle9i Application Server Administrator's Guide, always come first.
- Results from all other books come afterward, ordered alphabetically by book title.
- Search results within a particular book are listed in alphabetical order.
Because the search results are very granular, one search could result in hundreds of hits within the same book. You can reduce the number of matches by using one of the techniques in What if there are Too Many Results?.
- Titles that are too short to make sense out of context, such as
Purpose and Syntax, are followed by the name of their parent topic,
which is usually the name of the corresponding statement, function, and so on.
You might find on your first few searches that you get so many results
that you cannot tell which match to look at. To narrow your search, you can use the following suggestions:
- Instead of entering a single word, try a 2-word or 3-word phrase.
For example,
wireless application instead of wireless.
- If you have a general idea of which book the information is in,
use the List of All Books to search within a specific book or use the Search in box to select a group of books to search.
- Depending on the level of information you want, you can use the
Display topics box to search only for introductory information, tasks,
examples, or troubleshooting information.
- Select the Search headings only option instead of Search entire text. This reduces
the results to only those topics where the search term is important enough
to appear in headings.
- You can separate multiple words or phrases with
AND to find
only topics that contain both terms.
- If the problem is determining which book is the right one, you can select
the Format results into a virtual book option. It formats the results as a single combined table of contents, making
it easier to scan through similar topics from different books.
You might occasionally find that you get too few results or no results at all. To widen your search, use the following suggestions:
- Instead of a long phrase, trying entering a single word or a 2-word or 3-word phrase.
- Make sure the search term is spelled correctly. You might need to try a term with and without a
space. For example,
datatype gives more results than data type, and
bulk delete gives more results than bulkdelete.
- If you included words like
error or example in the search term to find specific kinds of information, you can leave these words out and use the Display topics box instead to find matches for specific kinds of topics.
- If the word you want might be known by more than one name, you can separate multiple words or phrases with
OR. For example, select or query.
- Is the information you want in the Oracle9i Application Server documentation at all? Oracle9i Database Server, Oracle9i Developer SUite, Oracle Applications, and other documentation outside Oracle9i Application Server is not covered by the search.
If the information you need is scattered across books, buried deep within
a book, or if you cannot find information to match your experience level, use the Virtual Book option to reorganize your results.
The Virtual Book categorizes information by grouping search results according to different levels of experience and detail:
- Introductory
- High-level information that is useful when you are first learning about
a subject. Typically, you only need to read it once.
- Tasks
- Includes both step-by-step procedures and more general explanations of
how to do things. You can find the topic you want based on your objective,
such as managing an Oracle9iAS instance or editing configuration files. You can also scan the list of
tasks to see what the possible actions are for an object.
- Examples
- If you are experienced, or just like to learn by example, you might
only need to look at one of these topics to understand how to do something.
Because there is some overlap between tasks and the associated examples,
some topics are listed under both Examples and Tasks.
- Reference
- This information usually concerns syntax or
similar details.
- Troubleshooting
- This information helps you recover when something goes wrong. It usually concerns errors, exceptions, and tasks such as debugging. If you want to
plan ahead, you can read this information before starting an operation, so that
you know what problems to avoid.
The Virtual Book includes other navigation mechanisms:
- Index
- Shows all the index entries containing the search term, together with
their second-level and third-level entries. The index terms are collected
from the indexes of all the books in the library.
- Bibliography
- The links from the Virtual Book transport you to various places in the
library. You might want to print out some relevant sections, but it is more convenient to print PDF files than HTML files. The bibliography lists all the books that are
represented in the Virtual Book output, and shows which chapters contain the
matching topics. You can follow the link to the PDF file for a book, and
print out only those sections containing relevant topics.
To keep the number of matches to a reasonable level,
the Virtual Book always searches the title text rather than the
complete text of each topic. It also does not support the AND and OR
operators as in the regular search. The options available on the search form have no effect on the Virtual Book
output. When creating the Virtual Book, the search engine always examines all the books and all the topics in the
library.
If you are exploring an area for the first time, you can use
the Virtual Book feature to see how much coverage that area has in the
documentation. The Virtual Book presents all the introductory topics first,
so that you can get a quick overview of that area.
When you are familiar with the book or group of books containing the information you want, you can use some shortcuts to get there:
- Use the Search in box on the search form to select a group of books. The category "Only administrative information" includes those books
containing the core administrative information -- Clickstream Intelligence Administrator's Guide, HTTP Server Administration Guide, Internet Directory Administrator's Guide, Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide, Personalization Administrator's Guide, Single Sign-On Administrator's Guide, Syndication Server User's and Administrator's Guide, and Web Cache Administration and Deployment Guide.
- To limit the search to a single book, you can go to the List of All Books and use the search link next to each book
name. You can also use the table of contents or index for that book.
Here are some additional tips. You'll see a random one of these
displayed underneath the search box on each page of results.
- Separate different search terms with
AND or OR to search for multiple words or phrases.
- Got hundreds of hits on a common term like XML or Java but don't know where to start? Select the option for a Virtual Book.
- Want to find a particular book such as the Application Developer's Guide? Browse the List of All Books on the home page.
- Too many search hits? Use the search controls on the search form to narrow down the results.
- Not sure how to spell it? Use the Master Index instead of searching.
- To look up the definition of a keyword, use the Master Glossary from the Getting Started tab.
- The search is not case-sensitive, so using all uppercase does not change the results.
- You can search any book by following the Search link from the List of All Books.
- Searching for a short word? Turn off wildcarding by surrounding it with { }. For example, {
TRUNC} instead of TRUNC avoids matches with TRUNCATE.
- Hundreds of search matches all in the same book? Try the Table of Contents links on the search results page.
- To get the best results, always search for the singular form of a word. The search will also find the plural.
- You can bookmark any set of search results, including the output from the Virtual Book search.
- On the search results page, you may have to scroll down to see the results.
- You can access this search as a portlet from your customized home page at my.oracle.com. It is under "Development Tools -> Doc Search".
- Looking for how-to information? Search for the name of an object. The system automatically suggests appropriate verbs.
Searching is not case sensitive. Because all searches work the same for uppercase and lowercase terms,
you do not need to enter a word in all capital letters.
If you are searching
for a keyword that matches a commonly used word, such as INDEX, use
one of these methods:
- Use the master index, rather than doing a search that would return thousands of matches.
- Do a heading search to see if the number of matching headings is small enough to find the right topic.
- If you do use a full-text search, then surround the term with braces, such as
{INDEX}. This will prevent wildcard expansion and limit the number of false matches.
If you are searching for a keyword that is the same as a commonly used
word, such as INDEX, it is faster to use another method rather than
sifting through thousands of matches. The Master Index has
entries for keywords like these.
If the system is responding slowly, you can expand the search results into a tree view to improve performance.
If the system is responding slowly because your search returned
thousands of matches, use some of the tips in What if there are Too Many Results? for reducing the number of
matches.
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