One of those small items that is easy overlooked (at least I overlooked it…) and…
Category: 11gR1, 11gR2
This story is long overdue and no its NOT about the Oracle Database 11g Database File System (DBFS). Its about an “undocumented” NFS functionality that, maybe someday, will be serviced by the XMLDB XDB Protocol Adapter. This post is “long overdue” because the actual attempts to try to figure it out were done during the bank holidays between X-mas and new year 2009.
So what is it all about. I once discovered in the Oracle 11gR1 documentation a small entry in the xmlconfig.xsd XML Schema regarding NFS elements that look like that they are or will be used for enabling NFS functionality based on the Oracle XMLDB Protocol Server architecture. In those days, when Oracle 11gR1 was just of the shelve, I made a few attempts, based on the xdbconfig.xsd XML Schema to adjust the corresponding xdbconfig.xml file that controls the XDB Protocol Server functionality, to see what would happen. At that time I only was able to get this far (see the picture) and I promised myself that I should look deeper into it trying to figure out if I could get it working and/or what the concepts were that made it tick in the XMLDB architecture but somewhere down the line I just didn’t come to it and it got “forgotten” by me due to my daily DBA workload.
Click picture to enlarge
You will probably never build only one structured XMLIndex. A practical use case would be an unstructured XMLIndex, indexing the semi-structured parts of your XML, multiple structured XMLIndexes, indexing the highly structured XML islands of data and maybe even a Oracle Text Context index indexing unstructured XML data.
So the next example’s will show how to build an unstructured XMLIndex and build multiple structured XMLIndexes on top of the first one. Also it will give some examples on what to do if you have made mistakes and/or how to apply some maintenance on the XMLIndex structures. You start of by determining which sections should be addressed by the Unstructured XMLIndex and via path subsetting restrict the index to that part (also see “Oracle 11g � XMLIndex (Part 2) � XMLIndex Path Subsetting” for more info on path subsetting). There should be, I think, a good reason for indexing the same node path via multiple structured or unstructured XMLIndexes. One I can think of is to support different kind of XML Queries, but be aware that it, multiple XMLIndex structures on the same nodes, will come with an extra index maintenance overhead.
Anyway, lets say you want most part (haven’t used path subsetting here for the unstructured XMLIndex, but as said I should have done) of the XML document indexed via a unstructured XMLIndex and an extra of two structured XMLIndexes on top of the domain XMLIndex…