My spin on the new Oracle APEX Application Development Service

I believe there have never been bigger announcements surrounding Oracle Application Express (APEX) than in the last weeks (or actually months). Oracle is really putting cannons on the marketing of Oracle APEX now!

In the Oracle APEX community, we typically come together at the many APEX conferences in the world. Things changed with COVID and while all the conferences got canceled, the awareness of Oracle APEX rose significantly. Oracle setup special forces to build COVID apps (including Larry Ellison himself!)... and used Oracle APEX to do so. Those apps were mentioned in the White House and many different articles around the world. Not only on the outside things changed, but also on the inside at Oracle, the view towards APEX changed a lot. Oracle APEX finally received the recognition of the leadership team we already knew it deserved for 15 years. And once Larry Ellison, Safra Catz, and the entire management and marketing team get behind something, it's unstoppable.  

It started on December 8th through the 10th, 2020, with the Build Low Code Apps using APEX - Partner Technical Council 2020, where Joel Kallman and many people of the APEX Development team gave an update and did Q&A with the audience. 

December 16th, 2020, with the Virtual Summit Build Applications Faster with Low Code. There were different presentations, but the biggest impact came from Michael Hichwa, the father of Oracle APEX, who announced the new Oracle APEX Application Development Service.

On January 13th, 2021, Andrew Mendelsohn, executive vice president of Oracle database server technologies, presented the latest announcements about Oracle Database 21c and the new Oracle Application Express (APEX) low-code application development service. 

This was followed by a press release the same day.

Today when you go to oracle.com, Oracle APEX is front and center.

 

So things changed a bit compared to a few years ago... so let's go back to why I am writing this blog post.

This new Oracle APEX Application Development Service is an interesting spin on the Oracle Cloud. Where before you would set up an Oracle Database and Oracle APEX came with it, with this service it's the other way around! You sign up for a Low Code Development Platform called Oracle APEX, and you get an Oracle Database with it!

I really like this service, because for a relatively low price (360 USD all costs included) you get a fully managed Oracle APEX instance running on unbeatable hardware (Exadata), which is able to autoscale based on your needs!

And what is even better, it looks like this service will also come in the Oracle Cloud Free Tier! I wonder if the disk space is the same as the ATP free tier... remains to be seen. At the moment you can either buy it or try it with the free credits when you sign up.

Just like my blog series when Oracle launched the Always Free Oracle Cloud, I thought to write a few posts while I set up and test this new service myself.

Here's my agenda for the upcoming blog posts (subject to change based on my experiences and questions raised by you):

1. Setup Oracle APEX Application Development Service (include configure of email sending)
2. Import an existing Oracle APEX app and Oracle database schema
3. Configure printing and exporting
4. Configure media conversion
5. Create a custom domain name
6. Setup and test automated scaling
7. Configure, running and using backups
8. Connecting from external tools e.g. Visual Studio Code and SQL Developer
9. Monitor your Oracle APEX instance
10. Final thoughts

I will update this post with the links to the new blog posts.