How to Use This Application & Help

Important: To use the Spatial Index Advisor application, you must understand the major concepts and techniques documented in the Oracle Spatial User's Guide and Reference. The Help information for this application does not describe Oracle Spatial concepts, data types, and functions.

Main Window

The main window includes the following:

• Menu bar, with the application menus

• Toolbar on the left side, with buttons for commonly used functions (display controlled by View > Show Toolbar)

• Tips area under the menu bar, with information about how to evaluate the displayed data and suggestions about what to do next (display controlled by View > Show Tips)

• Drawing area, showing layers, tiles, and query results

• Legend table, with an entry for each layer, tile, and query result that is displayed in the drawing area

• Layer information, where you can change the current layer, edit the properties of the current layer, and control whether the display is redrawn on every zoom and pan operation (Draw on zoom or pan option)

• Status bar at the bottom (display controlled by View > Show Status Bar)

Suggestions: Always display the tips (see View > Show Tips). If you want to be warned beforehand about potentially time-consuming operations, deselect (uncheck) the draw without warning feature (View > Draw Without Warning toggle setting).

The displayed objects can be a single indexed layer, two or more indexed layers. or one or more non-indexed layers. The available operations vary depending on the objects displayed.

Zoom and pan operations erase all other layers and queries in the drawing area; therefore, you are often asked to confirm these operations.

Dimmed (Grayed Out) Options

If any options are grayed out (dimmed) on a menu, tab, or dialog box, the option is not relevant or valid in the specific context.

Help System Navigator

Use the Dock button to attach the help topic tree to the left of the topic display area.

Use the Undock button to make the help topic tree a separate window from the topic display area.

Readme File

For important information about the current release of this interface, see the "readme" file (text or HTML) file that was installed with the software. The location is platform dependent.

See also: Main topics (outline)