About Querying

Querying is a way to locate one or more records that meet your criteria. The subset of records found by a query can be viewed on-screen, exported to a file, or used as input for a report. A query searches the database for a specific subset of data based on one or more conditions or criteria. For example, you might want to find all open service requests with a high priority. This query is performed in the Service screen with the query criteria of Status = Open and Priority = High.

When you create a query, you can save and reuse the criteria.

Predefined Queries

Your organization can provide predefined queries (PDQs). These predefined queries already have their criteria established and are found in the Queries drop-down list.

For example, if you are located in the western United States and always work with accounts located in California, the Queries drop-down list might contain a PDQ called CA Accounts that finds all the accounts in California. Every time you want to see only the California accounts, you do not have to create a new query. You can simply select the predefined CA Accounts query from the Queries drop-down list.

You cannot change predefined queries created by your organization.

When you execute a predefined query, the query always runs against all the data in the current screen. Even if you have run a query to narrow the data set, the predefined query always uses all data within the screen, not just the data shown in a list.

Case and Accent Insensitive Queries

Siebel query features provide indexes that directly support case insensitive and accent insensitive (CIAI) queries on eligible text columns. CIAI queries ignore both the case and use of accents to return all records that otherwise match your query. This capability is particularly important when searching for records such as contact or customer names. For example, a query that contains capitalization (such as MacArthur versus Macarthur) or where the use of accents is not consistent, an exact-match search might not return any records.

Your Siebel administrator can configure specified columns for CIAI queries by defining CIAI columns and CIAI indexes in the repository using the CIAI wizard in Siebel Tools. The CIAI wizard sets the Default Insensitivity property for CIAI columns to DB Case & Accent. CIAI-enabled fields are blank in the user interface. Whereas the fields that contain the property, Case Required, represent non CIAI-enabled fields.

A case-insensitive query works on all databases supported for the current release of the Siebel application. For more information about supported databases, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Oracle Technology Network. However, accent-insensitivity works only on the databases that provide the accent-insensitivity functionality, such as Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL).