Oracle APEX & SQL Developer feature request

If you think "I wish APEX (Oracle Application Express) did this", you can log those things in one central place now: the Oracle Application Express Feature Requests website.

Note that you first need to login with your Oracle Single Sign-on credentials before you're able to see that app.

The same exists for SQL Developer (actually it existed before the APEX feature request site). On Oracle SQL Developer Exchange you can add feature requests.

Both Oracle development teams look at those requests and will add those in the next versions of APEX. If you can't think of a feature request you'd like, you can also vote on other people's requests.
The highest the vote, the higher the change the request will be included in the next release!

I logged for example the request to extend the Cart in SQL Developer to include dependencies, so you are sure you have everything you need when you deploy your next application. (Note: the cart is a nice feature to generate the file you want to upload in Supporting Objects in APEX.)
I also voted for Git support in SQL Developer. Hopefully you would like those features too, then don't hesitate to vote :-)

OBUG Connect 2013: Call for presentations

“Connect to the future”

On March 26, 2013 the Oracle Benelux User Group is organizing OBUG Connect for the 6^th time in succession, and in close collaboration with Oracle and the Oracle Gebruikersclub Holland (OGh). Possibly you attended this event already in the past and you wish to present your customer case at the upcoming OBUG Connect 2013 conference. We offer you the ultimate possibility to share your personal experience with other Oracle customers within the Benelux.

You can find more information here. If you can make a valuable contribution to the success of OBUG Connect 2013, please click the ‘call for presentations’ and use the online submission form to send in your presentation.

OTN LA 2012 Pictures and Videos (South leg)

Pablo send me an email a while back he uploaded the pictures and videos of the OTN LA 2012 Tour (South leg).

Here's a list of the videos made in the countries I was in:

-) Argentina, Buenos Aires
-) Brasil, São Paulo
In one of the videos you will see Francisco Muñoz Alvarez, myself and Craig Shallahamer talking about how we find the tour so far.
-) Perú, Lima
-) Chile, Santiago

As you could read in previous blogposts, I really enjoyed the OTN Tour in Latin America, so it was nice to reminisce about the great people and nice environment.

(note: thanks Martin for the word "reminisce", I didn't have that word in my vocabulary yet!)

Free ebook on PacktPub website

Packt send me an email that they are celebrating the publication of its 1000th title, and they celebrate that by giving away a free ebook for everybody who already registered to www.packtpub.com, or who registers before 30th September 2012. Packt is also opening its online library for a week for free to members, offering customers an easy way to research their choice of free eBook.

There are some APEX, JQuery, Mobile and many others ebooks which I think are worthwhile to look for...

Opening of APEX Evangelists NL

It's with great pleasure we announce APEX Evangelists opens an office in the Netherlands too.

In the last years we saw a big uptake of Oracle Application Express in the BeNeLux, so we thought it made sense to open up, next to our Belgium office, another office in the Netherlands too. 

Today we announce Roel Hartman will join us to run the Netherlands office. You will still see me in the Netherlands, but having Roel as a local representative will make it even easier for Dutch clients to get in touch with us.

Roel is a great person with a lot of knowledge of APEX and Oracle in general.
I really look forward working with Roel in the next months and years.

new EA of APEX Listener 2.0

Previously I blogged about the difference between APEX Listener 1.x and 2.0.
A few days ago Oracle released a new Early Adopter (2) of APEX Listener 2.0.

In some VM's I had issues configuring the APEX Listener 2.0 EA1, but this seems to have fixed in EA2, so definitely worth to upgrade to this new early adopter or when it didn't work before, to give it a new try.

new version of SQL Developer (3.2.1)

A few days ago Oracle released a new version of Oracle SQL Developer 3.2.

The patch contains bug fixes and introduces some new features, but it also carries some behavioural changes. One caught me and I think many other people will hit the same issue.

The connection names in SQL Developer can't contain spaces anymore as it could do before version 3.2.1. Your current connections which contain spaces will still work, but you can't save them anymore incase you wanted to make a change. Below is an example of the connection with and without space.

I would have preferred connection names would still allow spaces, but it is what it is now, so following steps I found best to migrate my connection names to the new naming rules in SQL Dev 3.2.1:
-) right click on the connection name and click on Rename Connection
-) change all the spaces to underscores or take them off where possible

You could keep the names as they are for now (with spaces), but the issue I found was that if you add a new connection the order is not correct anymore, as first you will see all underscores and only after the the (old) connections with spaces.

Note that if you click on the connection and change it, and change the name at that time, it will create a new connection with the new name, that is why before I find it easier to just do a bulk rename of all my connection names.

I would definitely upgrade to the latest version of SQL Developer as you get more features with every new release and development becomes faster and easier.