Overview of Application Domain Indexes

An application domain index is a customized index specific to an application. Oracle Database provides extensive indexing to do the following:

• Accommodate indexes on customized, complex data types such as documents, spatial data, images, and video clips (see "Unstructured Data")
• Make use of specialized indexing techniques

You can encapsulate application-specific index management routines as an indextype schema object and define a domain index on table columns or attributes of an object type. Extensible indexing can efficiently process application-specific operators.

The application software, called the cartridge, controls the structure and content of a domain index. The database interacts with the application to build, maintain, and search the domain index. The index structure itself can be stored in the database as an index-organized table or externally as a file.

<<Overview of Function-Based Indexes

Overview of Index-Organized Tables >