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Additional to the tag oracle we have the tags oracle-8i, oracle-9i, oracle-10g, oracle-10g-r2, oracle-11g. oracle-11g-r2

All tags contain the statement

Please also tag oracle for search purposes.

oracle-10g should be used for Oracle Database 10g r1 and not for all 10g releases. Similar is the usage of oracle 11g defined. So all Oracle Database related questions should be tagged oracle. But how should a version specific tag be used? In the oracle11g tag we read

Questions specific to a particular database version may be tagged with a version tag such as oracle11g-r2, oracle-11g, oracle-10g or oracle-9i, but they should also be tagged oracle.

Do we really expect that a poster researches if a feature is introduced or specific for this version? Especially most of the posters that are new to Oracle Databases will not be aware of the history of a feature. And if a posts about an error, how should he know if it is a version specific error (e.g. a bug). So most users will tag the question according to the version of the database they use. This is definitely not the kind of usage that is recommended in some of the tag descriptions. For analyzing a problem the exact version of the database product is necessary and should be always supplied in the problem description, e.g

  • Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
  • Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.5.0 - 64bit Production
  • Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
  • Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production

These information if returned by the query

select * from v$version

I some options are enabled they are showed, too., and can be pasted into the post. Das anybody use a version specific oracle tag for searching? I can’t imagine that.

So I here is my question again: Do we really version specific oracle tags or can we abandon them?

If we want to use them, how do we use them?

2 Answers 2

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Oracle questions should be tagged .

Adding a version tag such as is optional (and encouraged).

The version tags are useful in that they give a quick indication of the product version the question is about (if not uniquely, then in the asker's context) without parsing the entire question (or even visiting the page).

It's not necessary that the primary issue in the question applies only to the tagged version.

The individual version tags are "followed" by a decent number of site users, meaning people have found them useful for locating questions they can answer, or are otherwise interested in. People can highlight or ignore tags, or get new questions emailed to them, so granularity below the whole product level is useful.

Another particular usage occurs when a new version of a product is released (e.g. for the product I use most often).

Related:

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They are nice to have.

Most askers don't specify their database version. But sometimes they add it as a tag.

If it's a simple RTFM question and tagged , then I provide the URL for documentation of that version.

If the question is about functionality that behaves differently on different versions, or exists only in specific versions, I reply based on that.

If there is no version specific tag or any version information, I automatically reply as if the asker used the latest, fully patched version.

The other way around of the above really bothers me though. Questions tagged , but not tagged . I often check the newest questions, but not the version specific tags. Because of this, some questions are simply overlooked. Like this one: how to recover oracle-xe recover datafile? (oracle-xe 11g)

If it's possible, I would link these tags to . So if anyone chooses the tag, let's say , that question should be automatically tagged as well, because people simply ignore the "should be tagged" part in the description.

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