Document Conventions and Tools
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation employs various visual cues to enhance the clarity and usefulness of the information it provides. This page explains those font and presentation conventions. It also provides tips for effective searches in the online Help and describes other features and tools.
Font Conventions
The following font conventions have specific meaning within this document.
User Interface Labels
Text and labels that appear in the user interface appear in bold text. For example:
In the Console, click Compute, and then choose your Compartment.
Commands
Commands that you enter from your keyboard appear in a monospace typeface. For example:
sudo su
Variables
Placeholder text for required values appears in red text surrounded by angle brackets. For example:
useradd <new_user>
Code and Response Examples
Code and system response examples appear in a monospace typeface. For example:
# UPDATEDEFAULT specifies if new-kernel-pkg should make
# new kernels the default
UPDATEDEFAULT=yes
# DEFAULTKERNEL specifies the default kernel package type
DEFAULTKERNEL=kernel-uek
Notes, Tips, and Cautions
The documentation applies the following styles to draw your attention to important information:
"Note" boxes provide information of special interest or importance to help you understand the behavior of the system.
"Important" boxes address essential points to complete a task or understand a topic.
"Tips" provide helpful suggestions that can improve your experience using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or alternative ways of doing things.
"Cautions" provide important information to help you prevent data loss or damage.
Reading Railroad Diagrams
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure uses railroad diagrams to express defined grammars, showing syntax for policy statements, queries, and other items.
When reading these diagrams, consider the following conventions:
-
Vertical bars indicate the beginning and end of an expression line.
-
The expression line reads from left to right (and sometimes down), following the line or any of the possible branches.
-
Literal values or commands are depicted as lozenge-shaped boxes.
For example,
1m
is a literal value for "Interval" in the following absent alarm query. -
Variable values are depicted as rectangular boxes.
For example,
metric
is a variable value in the following absent alarm query. -
Concatenation loops are indicated by either a comma or special symbols.
For example, a comma indicates possible concatenation loops for name-value pairs in the dimension component of the following absent alarm query.
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An optional component is indicated by an empty branch (no value or command) above or below it.
For example, the dimension and group components are optional in the following absent alarm query.
Example railroad diagram from Monitoring Query Language (MQL) Reference:
Document Tools
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation provides several tools to help you find the information you need. Chief among these tools is a powerful full-text search engine that features phrase, and partial-word searching.
The following tools do not apply to PDF documentation.
Online Search
When you search the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation, results appear in a ranked-order list. The ranking favors topics with search terms in page titles, followed by headings, and pages with multiple instances of the search terms. After titles and headings, search evaluates metadata descriptions, and then body text last. Search results include the topic title and an excerpt from the topic's first paragraph. When you click a topic to open it, your search terms are highlighted in the topic.
Full-text searches are case-insensitive. A search for the word "availability" returns results with both "availability" and "Availability". Searches also return variant endings. For example, a search for the word "run" also returns matches for words like "runner", "running", and "runs".
When you search by using multiple terms, a Boolean AND is inferred. (However, Boolean search is not supported.) You can search for precise matches on terms and phrases by enclosing the terms in quotation marks. For example, you can use quotation marks to search for the phrase "availability domain" and get results for topics in which those terms appear in that exact order.
Your search results can include topics that contain synonyms for the search term you specified. If the results include topics that do not appear to have your search term in them, be sure to scan those topics for relevant information. To avoid seeing results that contain synonyms, enclose your search term in quotation marks.
You can search for partial words and number strings with a minimum of three characters. For example, a search for "345" returns results such as "345" and "34567". A partially matching result always begins with the same first letter as the search term it matches.
To compensate for misspellings, searches apply fuzzy matching to search terms with a minimum of four characters. For example, a search for "victual network" returns results for "virtual network", replacing the letter "c" with the letter "r" to match "victual" to "virtual". The degree to which letter substitutions are allowed depends on the length of the search term. Search does not attempt the replacement of any letters in words that are four characters or less. If a word has between five and nine characters, search attempts to replace up to one letter when matching results. If a word has 10 characters or more, search allows up to two substitutions.
To determine the relevancy of a result, a search begins by matching against each word independently. Then, it treats the search input as a single phrase. Lastly, the location of matching terms, publication date, and popularity are considered. Popularity is determined by traffic, and an older topic might rank more highly in results than a newer topic if it is more popular.
By default, results are limited to content in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure product documentation. If you want to expand a search to the rest of the Oracle Help Center, close the scope chip by hovering over the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure scope chip, and then clicking the X.
The search engine does NOT recognize the asterisk (*) as a wildcard character.
Searching in PDF documents conforms to the search capabilities of your PDF reader.
Glossary Terms
A full glossary page provides definitions for all special terms used in this document. On many pages, glossary terms also appear as links upon their first use within the topic. To see the definition, hover your cursor over the term. For example:
Volumes are only accessible to instances in the same availability domain .
Supported Browsers
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports the following browsers and versions:
- Google Chrome 80 or later
- Safari 12.1 or later
- Firefox 62 or later (Private Browsing mode isn't supported)*
- Edge 104 or later
If you are having trouble signing in to the Console using the Firefox browser, it might be because of one of the following conditions:
-
You are in Private Browsing mode. The Console doesn't support Private Browsing mode. Open a new session of Firefox with Private Browsing turned off. If you require Private Browsing, you can set Firefox's
dom.indexedDB.privateBrowsing.enabled
preference totrue
to allow the Console to save login-related information to local storage. For more information, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox. -
You aren't on the latest version of Firefox. Upgrade to the latest version. To check to see if you are on the latest version, follow these instructions: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-what-version-firefox-you-are-using
When checking the version, note whether you are using Firefox or Firefox ESR.
- Your Firefox user profile is corrupted. To fix this issue:
-
Upgrade to the latest version of Firefox.
- Create a new user profile and open Firefox with the new profile. See Mozilla Support for instructions on how to create a new user profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
-
If none of the preceding suggestions resolves your issue, contact Oracle Support. In your problem description, ensure you specify whether you are using Firefox or Firefox ESR.