Oracle Text omitting the words as, is, do, or etc in searches

Question

I am trying to do a search using Oracle Text for the country code for Dominican Republic and I get no hits back. This is also the case for some other countries: IS (Iceland), NO (Norway), IT (Italy). Here is my where clause:
where contains(tablename, 'DO within country')
Is there any workaround for this?

Answer 1

Those words are stopwords, words that Oracle does not tokenize and index and are not searchable. If you do not specify a stoplist, then Oracle uses the default stoplist, that contains these words. If you use an empty stoplist or a stoplist that does not contain those words, then they are tokenized, inexed, and searchable. Please see the demonstration below that first recreates your situation, or something similar since I don't know what sort of section group you are using, then drops the index and recreates it using an empty stoplist, then shows that DO is tokenized, indexed, and searchable.
SCOTT@10gXE> CREATE TABLE your_table
  2    (address   VARCHAR2 (30),
  3       country   VARCHAR2 (2),
  4       tablename VARCHAR2 (30))
  5  /
Table created.
SCOTT@10gXE> INSERT INTO your_table VALUES ('somewhere', 'DO', NULL)
  2  /
1 row created.
SCOTT@10gXE> EXEC CTX_DDL.CREATE_PREFERENCE ('my_multi', 'MULTI_COLUMN_DATASTORE')
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SCOTT@10gXE> EXEC CTX_DDL.SET_ATTRIBUTE ('my_multi', 'COLUMNS', 'address, country')
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SCOTT@10gXE> EXEC CTX_DDL.CREATE_SECTION_GROUP ('my_section_group', 'BASIC_SECTION_GROUP')
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SCOTT@10gXE> EXEC CTX_DDL.ADD_FIELD_SECTION ('my_section_group', 'country', 'country')
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SCOTT@10gXE> CREATE INDEX your_index ON your_table (tablename)
  2  INDEXTYPE IS CTXSYS.CONTEXT
  3  PARAMETERS
  4    ('DATASTORE     my_multi
  5        SECTION GROUP my_section_group')
  6  /
Index created.
SCOTT@10gXE> SELECT token_text FROM dr$your_index$i
  2  /
TOKEN_TEXT
SOMEWHERE
SCOTT@10gXE> SELECT * FROM your_table
  2  WHERE  CONTAINS (tablename, 'DO WITHIN country') > 0
  3  /
no rows selected
SCOTT@10gXE> DROP INDEX your_index
  2  /
Index dropped.
SCOTT@10gXE> CREATE INDEX your_index ON your_table (tablename)
  2  INDEXTYPE IS CTXSYS.CONTEXT
  3  PARAMETERS
  4    ('DATASTORE     my_multi
  5        SECTION GROUP my_section_group
  6        STOPLIST CTXSYS.EMPTY_STOPLIST')
  7  /
Index created.
SCOTT@10gXE> SELECT token_text FROM dr$your_index$i
  2  /
TOKEN_TEXT
DO
SOMEWHERE
SCOTT@10gXE> SELECT * FROM your_table
  2  WHERE  CONTAINS (tablename, 'DO WITHIN country') > 0
  3  /
ADDRESS                        CO TABLENAME
somewhere                      DO
SCOTT@10gXE>