Oracle Heralds a New Dawn for APEX

Oracle recently published news about their new exciting new Cloud offering – the APEX Application Development Service. This service is a fully supported “APEX first” environment which allows you to build and host applications, without having to think about the database.

At $360 per month, this is a great entry level environment to get your APEX application onto Oracle Cloud, and it’s possible to upgrade the environment to a full ATP service.

Features of APEX Services

Below is a list of features that the APEX Service includes (at the time of writing):

• Oracle Database
• APEX 20.2
• ORDS 20.3.1
• SQL developer Web
• 1 OCPU
• 1TB of data
• Access to Oracle Cloud support

The service specification can be increased as you need it, either automatically or manually.

This service is brilliant if you need a low-cost option for building and hosting production APEX applications. It couldn’t be easier to set up and you don’t have to worry about the back end at all.

Negatives

There are however a couple of downsides:

• It isn’t possible to connect to the database itself using SQL*Net. This means you cannot connect using the full version of SQL Developer or third-party development tools, and it also makes migration of data difficult. If you need this functionality then you need to make the switch to full ATP.
• You cannot use custom domains, although work is underway to resolve this (source: Twitter).

Summary

Overall, this service is fantastic. If you want to quickly start developing apps in Oracle Cloud, this is certainly the way to go, and you can seamlessly upgrade to a full ATP environment if and when you eventually need to.

It’s also, for DSP-Explorer as the foremost APEX consultancy in the UK, refreshing to see Oracle finally shouting about APEX as a development tool. For many years it has been seen as a database tool only and never mentioned in the same sentence as “development” (despite being by far the best Oracle development tool available). After watching APEX grow in strength and popularity over many years, it’s safe to say it is now where it belongs at the forefront of “Oracle Development”.

Author: Craig Sykes 

Job Title: Senior Oracle Development Consultant

Bio: Craig is a Senior Development Consultant at DSP-Explorer. Craig has an MSc in Computing Science and is an experienced software engineer, utilising development tools such as PL/SQL and APEX to provide bespoke ERP software to both UK and international businesses. Craig has experience developing solutions to connect Oracle systems to a wide range of existing external applications within business environments.