It’s been a year since I published 2 webpages that displayed the end dates for support as a single point of reference—one for Oracle APEX and ORDS, and one for Oracle Forms & Reports. I also included compatibility matrices for APEX and ORDS and APEX and the Oracle Database. I hope this has been useful for people to have all that information in one place.
In the year that has passed, these webpages have been updated alongside a brief blog to highlight the changes. As it has been a year since these webpages were published and with the much-hyped release of APEX 26.1, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the support dates and see what has changed. With the anticipation of the release of APEX 26.1 and all its AI features, it can get lost that some applications are not running on the latest and greatest versions of APEX for many reasons, so to have these webpages could be vital for these people to stay in support whilst plans are made to upgrade.
Below is a brief overview of the changes.
Oracle have not made any changes to the support dates for older versions. But, with the release of APEX 26.1, there is a newer version of APEX for people to use, with all its AI features, with the caveat that you need to be on DB version 23.26 to be able to benefit from these features. So, this might require a DB upgrade as well as an APEX upgrade in some cases. That’s not to mean you can’t use APEX 26.1 on older DB versions, as it is still compatible with DB version 19c and above, but without the use of APEXLang and the other AI features.
There are also some restrictions with APEX 26.1 when it comes to ORDS, as it is not backwards compatible with older versions of ORDS like previous APEX versions. To run APEX 26.1 with ORDS, the ORDS version must match or be greater than the APEX version, so, at the time of writing, this would be ORDS 26.1 or ORDS 26.2.
Since the last update, APEX 23.1 and 23.2 have gone out of support, and APEX 24.1 is within its last 6 months of being supported.
Oracle has kept up its schedule of releasing 4 ORDS updates per year and has just released ORDS 26.2. As mentioned above, you will need this or ORDS 26.1 to run the new version of APEX with ORDS.
Since the last update, ORDS 24.3 and ORDS 24.4 have dropped out of support, and ORDS 25.1 and ORDS 25.2 are within the last 6 months of being supported.
There has been no movement in the support dates for Oracle Forms & Reports.
Hopefully this update will help with planning or strategic decisions being made in relation to these Oracle development tools. Be sure to review and bookmark the webpages for the Oracle APEX and ORDS support reference, and the Oracle Forms support reference.
If you need assistance migrating to Oracle APEX from Oracle Forms & Reports or need some help and guidance with upgrading your Oracle APEX or ORDS versions, then please get in touch. We have plenty of experience with both and would be happy to help in any way we can. Please see our services and testimonials on our website for more details.