Searching the Help
To search for information in the Help, type a word or phrase in the Search box. When you enter a group of words, OR is inferred. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search.
Results returned are case insensitive. However, results ranking takes case into account and assigns higher scores to case matches. Therefore, a search for "cats" followed by a search for "Cats" would return the same number of Help topics, but the order in which the topics are listed would be different.
Words and Phrases
| Search for | Example | Results |
|---|---|---|
| A single word | cat
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Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats". |
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A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase. |
"cat food" (quotation marks) |
Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase. |
Using Boolean Operators
| Search for | Operator | Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Two or more words in the same topic |
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| Either word in a topic |
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| Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase |
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| Topics that contain one string and do not contain another | ^ (caret) |
cat ^ mouse
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| A combination of search types | ( ) parentheses |
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Providers and Consumers
You connect to providers using connection strings. For example, if an Oracle database is a provider, to connect to its services, you might need:
- The IP address of the machine
- The SID
- The TCP port
These three pieces of information would comprise the connection strings required by a consumer, which are needed to connect to a service offered by that provider. For example, an Oracle connection string could contain the following information:
- IP addresses: 1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2
- Port: 1521
- SID: abcd
A consumer is aware of at least one connection string for a provider, and this connection string is found in a known location, such as a configuration document, a database table, Windows registry, and so on. By searching through these locations, dependencies between consumers and providers can be discovered.
If the connection strings of a provider are found in a certain configuration document, then the provider and the container of the configuration document are connected with a consumer-provider relationship.
The process of discovering consumer-provider dependencies then becomes straightforward: Connection strings from the provider are searched for in the consumer's configuration documents, and the search results contain all configuration documents owned by the consumers of the specified provider.
For more information, see Define Dependencies.
