The Things an APEX Developer Should Be Aware of When Developing APEX Applications on an Oracle Autonomous Database

Back in June 2019, Oracle announced the availability of APEX on the Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB). Then in September 2019 at OpenWorld ‘Always Free’ services (of which the ADB and therefore APEX is one of them) was announced. This allows anyone to quickly and easily spin up a cloud instance of the Oracle database and start developing in APEX.

I prepared and gave a presentation on my experiences of this as an APEX Developer for UKOUG Techfest 2019 and below is a recording of this.

I was due to use some elements of this presentation for presentations I was giving at OUG Ireland 2020 and APEX World 2020 so I had been holding back on releasing the recording until after those. Unfortunately, both of those events have been postponed/cancelled so I can now release a recording of the original presentation.

One aspect I talk about has changed slightly. Going forward the notification system, frequency and choice of when APEX will be upgraded on an ADB is going to be improved from APEX 20.1 onwards. We believe there will be an announcement about this from Oracle at some point when APEX 20.1 is released so when this happens I may follow up to provide an update on the changes if the Oracle announcement isn’t clear enough.

In the presentation, I look into the below topics, I have time-stamped (opens in new tab) the sections below for reference but would recommend watching the whole presentation as I regularly reference other sections throughout and build up a story:

• APEX Growth (02:51), Enterprise Challenges (07:20)
• History (09:27), Description (11:22), Features, Types and Provisioning of an Autonomous Database (34:51)
• ADW (Autonomous Data Warehousing) and ATP (Autonomous Transaction Process) comparison (12:40)
• ‘Always free’ and paid comparison (16:42) – Limitations, Workarounds and Solutions (21:02)
• APEX development differences (36:31)
• Migration to the ADB (42:30)
• Benefits for APEX developers (43:24)
• Support Processes (44:55)
• Security Considerations (48:50)
• Summary (50:23)

Author: Paul Jones

Job Title: Oracle APEX Development Consultant

Bio: Paul is a Development Consultant at DSP-Explorer. Paul has a BSc in Computing from the University of Leeds and is now building on considerable experience in development and support using Oracle PL/SQL and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Paul is employing APEX to provide quality, bespoke software solutions both internally and to a range of organisations.