What's New in Oracle Text?

Name matching

Someone accustomed to the spelling rules of one culture can have difficulty applying those same rules to a name originating from a different culture. Name matching provides a solution to match proper names that might differ in spelling due to orthographic variation. It also enables you to search for somewhat inaccurate data, such as might occur when a record's first name and surname are not propertly segmented.

Result set interface

A page of search results typically consists of many disparate elements, such as metadata of the first few documents, per-word hit counts, or total hit counts. In past releases of Oracle Text, generating these results required several queries and calls, such as a query on the base table, a call to CTX_QUERY.COUNT_HITS, and so on. Each call required time to reparse the query and look up index metadata. In this release, instead of accessing the database to construct bits of the search results, you can use the result set interface, which is able to produce the various kinds of data needed for a page of search results all at once, thus improving performance by sharing overhead. The result set interface can also return data views that are difficult to express in SQL, such as top N by category queries.

On Windows systems, the executable file that you specify for the USER_FILTER command attribute must now exist in the %ORACLE_HOME%/ctx/bin directory instead of %ORACLE_HOME%/bin.

Zero downtime for applications with new incremental indexing and online index creation.

New features for re-creating an index online and finer control for maintenance processes.

New Oracle Text Manager in Oracle Enterprise Manager with which you can:

• Monitor health of Oracle Text indexes.

• Modify index settings.

• Generate index-level statistics about disk space, fragmentation, garbage, frequency of words, and more.

• Synchronize, optimize, and rebuild indexes.

• Diagnose problems, and resume failed operations.

• Manage logs.

New support for composite domain index for CONTEXT indextype for improved mixed-query performance.

Improved query performance and scalability.

New SDATA section type and SDATA operator that enable range searches on metadata.

New user-defined scoring feature, DEFINESCORE and DEFINEMERGE.

New values for the INDEX_STEMS attribute of the BASIC_LEXER type to enable better query performance for stem ($) queries.

NOPOPULATE option for ALTER INDEX to support incremental indexing.

New limit for the number of partitions in Oracle Text is now the same as the maximum for Oracle Database.

New usage tracking feature.