Important update of ORDS... release 19.4

A few days ago Oracle released Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 19.4.

In my opinion, it's a major release and most likely worth investigating to upgrade for everybody. For me, the following 3 improvements are worth the upgrade:

Performance of REST APIs

The performance of ORDS based REST APIs was significantly improved in ORDS 19.4.0 by changing how ORDS handles proxied database connections. You can read more about this in the readme.

We have a customer hitting ORDS through a mobile app really hard (potentially 130 000 end-users), so any improvements in this area are awesome for those types of customers.

Removal of PDF Generation Support

As previously advised in the ORDS 18.4.0 Release Notes, the Apache FOP based functionality to produce PDF Reports from Oracle Application Express (APEX) has been removed in this release. This means that if you still want to print or export files in Oracle APEX, you most likely want to look at using APEX Office Print (AOP). AOP is the most integrated printing and exporting solution for Oracle Application Express and the defacto standard these days. It comes with an AOP Report which is similar to what ORDS provided to APEX: based on the print attributes it generates a PDF. But, AOP gives you tons more features and flexibility when you want to print and export from APEX!
When you install the AOP Plug-in, choose your own template, for example, and look at the different Data Types that are available.

SQL Developer Web

This release sees the introduction of Oracle SQL Developer Web, an ORDS hosted web application giving Oracle Database users an interface for executing queries and scripts, creating and altering database objects, building data models, accessing Performance Hub, and viewing database activity.

After setting the following properties in default.xml:

You can access SQL Developer Web through:

http(s)://your_server:your_port/ords/sql-developer

You log in with a database user and password who is REST enabled. In this script I REST enable the user DIMI:

BEGIN
    ORDS.ENABLE_SCHEMA(p_enabled => TRUE,
                       p_schema => 'DIMI',
                       p_url_mapping_type => 'BASE_PATH',
                       p_url_mapping_pattern => 'dimi',
                       p_auto_rest_auth => FALSE);
    commit;
END;
/

This is what SQL Developer Web looks like, a browser-based version of SQL Developer (desktop) and a better version of what you find in SQL Workshop in APEX (although not all features are in yet, for example, I miss editing of a record):

SQL Developer Web includes another jewel... a Database Dashboard and Activity Monitoring!
When you log in with a user with the PDB_DBA role, you get a whole new section:

You find also more information in the ORDS 19.4 documentation.

Jeff Smith wrote a nice blog post about how to get started with SQL Developer Web too.

Really nice release!