Procedure for Creating Index

Pre-8.1

The pre-8.1 procedure for creating an index is

1. determine indexing preferences

2. create index preferences

3. create index policy

4. Call CTX_DDL.CREATE_INDEX procedure, specifying the policy

8.1

The process for creating an index is simpler because of the following

• policies do not exist in 8.1

• by default, the system automatically detects your language, the datatype of the text column, format of documents, and sets indexing preferences accordingly. This means that creating your own preferences is now optional for creating an index.

By default, the system expects your documents to be stored in a text column. Once this requirement is satisfied, you can create a text index using the CREATE INDEX SQL command as an extensible index of type ConText, without explicitly specifying any preferences.

See Also: For more information about the out-of-box defaults, see Oracle8i interMedia Text Reference.

The 8.1 procedure for creating an index is:

1. Optionally, determine your custom indexing preferences if not using defaults. In this step, you determine the following preferences:

   Preference Class	Description
   Datastore	How are your documents stored?
   Filter	How can the documents be converted to plaintext?
   Lexer	What language is being indexed?
   Wordlist	How should stem and fuzzy queries be expanded?
   Storage	How should the index data be stored?
   Stop List	What words or themes are not to be indexed?
   Section Group	How are documents sections defined?

   See Also: For more information about the preference objects available in the 8.1 release, see Oracle8i interMedia Text Reference.

2. Optionally, create your own custom preferences. See "Creating Preferences" in this chapter.

3. Create the Text index with the SQL command CREATE INDEX, naming your index and optionally specifying preferences. See "Creating an Index" in this chapter.