Preface

All uppercase plain 

SQL> ALTER DATABASE 

Indicates command names, SQL reserved words, and keywords.  

Italic 

Italic is used to indicate a variable:

filename

Indicates a value that you must provide. For example, if a command asks you to type filename, you enter the actual name of the file.

Italic is also used for emphasis in the text and to indicate the titles of other guides. 

square brackets [ ] 

x:\[pathname]\oracle\home_name 

Encloses optional items. For example, when you create an Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA)-compliant Oracle home directory, you can place an optional pathname before the \oracle pathname.

Square brackets also indicate a function key, for example [Enter].  

C:\> 

C:\ORACLE> 

Represents the Windows platforms command prompt of the current hard disk drive. Your prompt may differ and may, at times, reflect the subdirectory in which you are working. Referred to as the MS-DOS command prompt in this guide. 

Backslash (\) before a directory name 

\bin 

Indicates that the directory is a subdirectory of the root directory. 

oracle_home and oracle_base 

Go to the oracle_base\oracle_home\bin directory. 

In this Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA)-compliant release, all subdirectories are no longer under a top level oracle_home directory. There is now a new top-level directory called oracle_base that by default is c:\oracle. The Oracle home directories are located directly under oracle_base.

If you install Oracle8i release 8.1.7 on a computer where there is no other Oracle software on the computer, the default settings for the first Oracle home directory is c:\oracle\ora81. If you run Oracle Universal Installer again and install release 8.2.x, the second Oracle home directory is called \ora82.

All directory path examples in this guide follow OFA conventions. For more information on OFA, see Oracle8i Administrator's Guide for Windows NT. 

HOME_NAME 

OracleHOME_NAMETNSListener  

Represents the Oracle home name. The home name can be up to sixteen alphanumeric characters. The only special character allowed in the home name is the underscore. 

HOMEID 

HOME0, HOME1, HOME2 

Represents a unique registry subkey for each Oracle home directory in which you install products. A new HOMEID is created and incremented each time you install products to a different Oracle home directory on one machine. Each HOMEID contains its own configuration parameter settings for installed Oracle products. 

Symbols 

period .

comma ,

hyphen -

semicolon ;

colon :

equal sign =

backslash \

single quote `

double quote "

parentheses () 

Symbols other than brackets and vertical bars must be entered in commands exactly as shown. 

Operating System-specific 

Installation, configuration, and use of Oracle products in a Windows environment. Operating system-specific documents are occasionally referred to in the generic documentation set. These documents are easy to identify because they always mention their specific operating system in their title. 

Generic 

Oracle database, Oracle networking, and Application Programming Interfaces information that is uniform across all operating system platforms. The majority of documents in your documentation set belong to this category. While reading through the generic documentation set, you are occasionally asked to refer to your platform (or operating system) documentation for procedures specific to the Windows operating systems.

To easily identify where these generic documentation references are described in your operating system documentation, see the index of this guide for the following entry:

generic documentation references

All generic documentation references described in this guide appear under this index entry.