Trying to find a group I accidentally moved with a drag and ran into this problem. The group name was Auto but trying a search “name==Auto kind==group” resulted in hundreds of hits because of another database with loads of folders named “auto”. So I added scope!=Sources but that doesn’t seem to be recognized.
Also, came across this in the docs:
“All terms are case-insensitive. You may, if you wish, use capitalization for proper names in a query, but DEVONthink will ignore case in interpreting the query.”
A case sensitive search would have easily solved this. I even tried name==[A]uto but it gets ignored.
First time I came across a database query that would not allow case sensitivity.
define a smart group selecting for name==Auto kind===group in all databases.
in the result window, make sure that “location” is visible
sort by “location” there.
that should make it easy to find the database you’re looking for.
If a search returns case-(in)sensitive data, depends very much on the environment. E.g., both MacOS filesystems in use today (HFS+ and APFS) can be set up to be case-insensitive (that was in fact the default for HFS+ some time ago). MySQL, one of the better known databases, also offers case-insensitive comparisons, depending on the character set selection for a particular column. In Oracle, case-sensitivity is a session parameter since version 10gR2.
So it may be the first time that you came across case-insensitive search, but it is by no means unusual. It is also useful in many cases: Data entered manually tends to contain typing errors. Case-insensitive search helps to alleviate some of these errors (as does, for example, equating ä/ö/ü to a/o/u in germanic languages).
