Re: TOP N syntax in Oracle 9i.

On 29 Apr 2002 13:04:24 -0700, dreadlord76_at_yahoo.com (dreadlord76) wrote:
>The things with Docs are that they are KEYWORD based, and if you Don't
>Know the keyword, you can't look it up. I always run into this
>problem, spending a tremendous amount of time figuring out how to ask
>the question.
>
>With regards to the particulars in question. Lookup ROWNUM in the
>Oracle docs, under the section of Pseudocolumns. I don't know about
>others, but I didn't find this very intuitive the first time I went
>looking.

There are some features at tahiti.oracle.com to help if you don't know the keywords.

If you check off the "virtual book option, the system will search headings and index entries for exact matches, then arrange the results in ascending order of detail: first the conceptual stuff, then "how to", then examples and reference.

In this case, a virtual book on "top-n" yields a pretty bare-bones result page:

http://tahiti.oracle.com/pls/db901/db901.generic_report?search=top-n&search2=

However, the one item it did find in the master index goes right to the spot with the answer.

For other items that do give a reasonable number of hits, the links under the "Introductory" category should lead to discussions that define the terminology (particularly in the Concepts manual).  

If you want to know what you can do with an object, feature, etc., just enter its name and ignore the large number of hits. If you're logged into OTN, you'll see a list of verbs (creating, deleting, configuring, etc.) related to that thing. Follow any of these links and you should get a very short list of results. This way, you don't have to guess whether the doc talks about "adjusting", "tuning", "changing", etc., you can see all the possibilities.

For SQL programming, once you have an idea of the keyword in question, you don't need to worry whether it's a SQL statement, PL/SQL statement, SQL function, PL/SQL package, etc. All of these are combined in the "SQL keywords" quick reference. In this case, ROWNUM is under:

http://tahiti.oracle.com/pls/db901/db901.sql_keywords?letter=R#index-RO

John

--
Got an Oracle database question?
Try the search engine for the database docs at:
http://tahiti.oracle.com/