Sunday, February 16, 2020

Free Oracle Cloud: 19. Oracle APEX upgrades (19.1 to 19.2)

This post is part of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

Many people wonder how you can upgrade your Oracle APEX version to the latest version in your cloud account. The short answer is: you can't...

Oracle is doing this for you, whenever they believe it is the right time to do. The idea is that at some point you can tell Oracle when it would be a good time to upgrade your APEX environment in a specified window, but today, that is not there yet.

I read that a few days ago Oracle upgraded the APEX release to 19.2 on the free cloud.

I didn't use my Always FREE Oracle Cloud account for a few weeks, so it was stopped.
I went in the Oracle Cloud console to start it again and up we go.


Through the Tools menu, I open APEX and logged in into my CLOUD workspace. But, to my surprise my APEX version was still 19.1.

I was doing a few things when suddenly I got "Application Express is being upgraded to a newer version":


When trying to open APEX from the console, I couldn't anymore.


I waited a couple of minutes and there it was ... APEX came back and was upgraded to 19.2:



So it looks like Oracle is checking your APEX release when you start your database and when it sees it's an older version, it will just upgrade. I thought that probably because my account was stopped, Oracle will try again in the maintenance window, but my experience learns it's not waiting on that window.

I'm glad Oracle upgraded APEX for me automatically, but it would be nice to have a log somewhere or some info that it will do this. Hopefully, this blog post will help people who only fire up their instance occasionally when doing a demo. It's best to do it a bit before so the upgrade takes place before you need your APEX instance.