Oracle10g Text, new Features

Oracle 10g Text (an db-integrated full text search engine with document classification, theme seaching and viewing capabilities) offers some new features. oracle Text becomes more and more integrated within the database. in former versions (intermedia text) an external process synchronized all text indexes and has to be running if you wanted to query new data. These are some new characteristics:

no separate job or process has to sync the index any more. A new SYNC parameter allows control this. SYNC MANUAL is the old way, you have to implement an explicit logic to sync the indexes. SNYC EVERY INTERVALSPEC is for cyclic sync and SYNC ON COMMIT maintains the affected index at the end of a transaction. Commit returns not until the sync is done. Syncing is implemented internally in an autonomous transaction, in case of an error, but does not lead the main transaction to fail.

TRANSACTIONAL is to control whether changes on a text index column are queryable immediate after the corresponding DML statement returns.

create index online is possible (indextype CONTEXT only). DML Changes are allowed during Oracle creates the text index.

Query logs. With this its possible to run reports about search term usages

a BASIC_LEXER for new german spelling is available. Written word in new and old style are treated equally.

it is still not supported to create an index on a IOT Table (index organized table, tabledata is stored sorted and moves on DML activity)

a new indextype CTXXPATH is introduced to speedup Indexes on XMLTYPE columns , especially when existsNode() is used.

Some tests are following, i want to check out some weak points (if they are still ... implemented)