UKOUG Tech15 – Day 2 – focus on APEX 5

This second day of the UKOUG just ended and now is the time for the b… blog! The first day I really focused my agenda on presentations regarding integration between products and solutions provided by Oracle: the SOA Suite, the new ICS (Integration Cloud Services), the API Manager, aso… For this second day, I wanted to see something else, a little bit more closer to what dbi services can provide so I mainly attended sessions about APEX.

Some of my colleagues in the Middleware team are able to develop applications using APEX and do a lot of stuff with that. I can’t say that I understand everything they are doing and how they are doing it but I always found the concept of having an application actually running in a database quite interesting so I’m following the news around this Oracle product from time to time.

Sessions of the day

For this second day, I attended a very interesting session regarding some really important things to not forget when creating/managing Interactive Reports in APEX because it can just make your IRs unusable. This session has been presented by Peter Raganitsch (FOEX) which clearly explained what is actually happening on the background when you create or use the IRs and what can be done to debug and improve your user’s experience. Basically, you must check, verify and validate which query is running for different kind of actions and you need to make sure that it is exactly what you want. APEX is, by default, using a pre-defined configuration that complexify a little bit the SQL which can lead to really bad performance on thousands (millions) of rows.

After that, I attended another session that presented why does your development will be much more faster with APEX 5.x compared to 4.x. This session has been presented by Anthony Rayner (Oracle), a member of the APEX development team, which demonstrated the usage of the new interfaces/features compared to the previous versions: this was all about the use of the Page Designer (new browser-based IDE introduced in 5.0) and the new Code Editor.

Another really interesting session I attended has been presented by Hilary Farrell (Oracle) which mainly explored the Charting Capabilities of APEX 5.0 and 5.1. She presented quickly what changed regarding the charts since APEX 3.1 with new features, new versions of the AnyCharts incorporated inside APEX, the new Oracle JET Charts (JavaScript Extension Toolkit) that replace the AnyCharts, aso… She also talked about the new elements and charts that came with APEX 5.1 and I must that it looks pretty cool!

The only small negative point of this second day is that almost all presentations around APEX were given by Oracle employees (the only exception is the first session I mentioned earlier). That’s maybe not the best way to be objective but at least Oracle did a good job because all their sessions were very interesting and instructive.

I don’t already know what I will do tomorrow but I hope I will finally be able to see a WebLogic Aministration Console somewhere. (or at least a command prompt please! :D)