Thursday, December 26, 2019

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!

Monday, December 23, 2019

Free Oracle Cloud: 18. Monitoring your website and APEX app

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

As more and more people are putting their production apps on the Always Free Oracle Cloud, it's probably a good idea to start monitoring your instance. (but remember this is a no-SLA environment)

Over the last few weeks, it's happened to me - my EU test database was stopped and one of my compute instances was accidentally dropped and restored. Oracle notified me and took action themselves:


If I had monitoring on, I would have seen this myself. The above case I couldn't solve on my own, but it could happen that some software you are running goes down, or something else makes your site/app unavailable due to your own code. If that happens you want to take action and verify if things are ok.

There are many monitoring tools out there, some are paid, some are free. I've used Pingdom and UptimeRobot. It takes only a minute to set it up. I'll show how to do it with UptimeRobot.

Sign-up at uptimerobot.com


Click the New Monitor button and specify the URL you want to monitor.
Add a type of connection where you want to be notified and you are done!


You can simulate what happens if you go into your compute instance and stop the webserver.

nginx -s stop

Depending on the monitoring interval you will get an email within 5 minutes when your URL can't be reached.


You can also log in and see in the dashboard how much uptime you had and when you were down:

You can restart your web server by doing:

systemctl restart nginx

A few minutes later UptimeRobot will notify you all is good again :)


And surely in the dashboard, we are UP again:

Happy monitoring!

Free Oracle Cloud: 17. Configure domain to redirect to APEX app

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

In a previous blog post, we configured the webserver on our Compute VM Instance. We added a website and configured the domain dgielis.com to point to this instance.

I got many requests on how to point the domain name to a specific Oracle APEX app. This is what I will cover in this blog post.

Lets start with connecting to our VM:

From a Terminal connect to your Oracle Cloud VM:

ssh -i ssh_key opc@public_ip

The first thing we do, is changing to the root user, as we want to configure the web server. Alternatively in front of every command you can add sudo.

We logged in as the OPC user, to become the ROOT user we do:

sudo su

# open the configuration file we created in the previous blog post
vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/dgielis.com.conf

# add following
  location / {
    rewrite ^/$ /ords/f?p=101:LOGIN_DESKTOP:0 permanent;
  }

# save and quit (:wq)

My config file looks now like this:


# to test Nginx configuration
nginx -t 

# to restart Nginx
nginx -s reload

That's it.

Friday, December 13, 2019

The best way to be productive with APEX Office Print (AOP)

We often get the question of "how to be the most productive creating a template for APEX Office Print (AOP)".

Here are two examples of people asking in different ways:



My short answer: I recommend to use the Fast Template Switcher in our AOP Sample App or when you use the on-premises version of AOP, connect to the server and use the AOP Web Editor.

In this blog post, I will do a step-by-step guide on how I believe you will be most performant building your templates and using them in AOP.

If you didn't install APEX Office Print (AOP) yet, please read my blog post Setup APEX Office Print (AOP) to export to PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, HTML and Text

Now, we will add AOP to a button on a page in an APEX app.

Dynamic Action Plug-in

When you have a button on the page, right-click on it and choose "Create Dynamic Action".
Give it a name and as Action, specify APEX Office Print (AOP) - DA [Plug-in]



Data

The most important part of any report is the data it contains. So, the first step is to define where AOP can find all the data you want to use in the report. AOP gives you the ability to get all your data through a hierarchical SQL statement by using the cursor() or JSON syntax. For example, if we want to query all the orders and order lines (details) of a given customer we can specify in the Data Source:

select
  'file1' as "filename", 
  cursor(
    select
      c.cust_first_name as "cust_first_name",
      c.cust_last_name  as "cust_last_name",
      c.cust_city       as "cust_city",
      cursor(
        select 
          o.order_total      as "order_total", 
          'Order ' || rownum as "order_name",
          cursor(
            select 
              p.product_name as "product_name", 
              i.quantity     as "quantity",
              i.unit_price   as "unit_price", 
              APEX_WEB_SERVICE.BLOB2CLOBBASE64(p.product_image) as "image",
              40 as "image_max_width"
              from demo_order_items i, demo_product_info p
             where o.order_id = i.order_id
               and i.product_id = p.product_id
          ) "product"
         from demo_orders o
        where c.customer_id = o.customer_id
       ) "orders"
    from demo_customers c
   where customer_id = :P1_CUSTOMER_ID
  ) as "data"
from dual

In case your data is more complex than you can define in a hierarchical SQL statement, you can also specify a PL/SQL Function or a JSON data source.

AOP Template

Now you want this data in a specific look and feel. AOP allows you to specify your own template written in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML, and Text. A good way to start your template is by using the AOP Template (which is selected by default). This means you don't specify your own template yet, but let AOP generate a starting template for you, based on the data you provided. AOP can generate a starter template in Word, Excel, and HTML.


Based on your data, it will generate a {tag} for every column you have. When AOP sees there are multiple records (a table), it will generate a loop statement {#tag}{/tag} as well.

Now you can iterate over your template to make it exactly as you want it to look like. Just rearrange the {tags} to the specific positions where you want your data to be. Apart from that, you are in Word (or Excel, Powerpoint, ...) and have access to all of the native Word features to create a gorgeous look and feel. If you already have a document, you can also copy and paste the tags from the AOP Template into your existing document.

What I see, is that people adjust the template, upload the template, adjust, upload, adjust, upload over and over. There's actually a much faster way to iterate through template development.

Local Debug

Behind the scenes, the AOP Plug-in generates a JSON file that is being sent to the AOP Server.
To get this JSON, you can go into Shared Components > Component Settings > APEX Office Print and set Debug to Local. This will enable AOP Debug for the entire application. If you just want to put AOP Debug on for the current button, add the following to the Init PL/SQL Code of the AOP Dynamic Action:

aop_api_pkg.g_debug := aop_api_pkg.c_debug_local;

This is what you should see in the Dynamic Action:


When you click the button, you will get the JSON file.

Quickly changing Templates

With AOP we ship an AOP Sample App. This is an APEX application which showcases many features of APEX Office Print:


In the Debugging section, you find a Quick Template Changer link:


The Quick Template Changer allows you to quickly try new templates based on an AOP JSON file.


You drag the JSON file in the first box under Exported JSON.
The JSON will be parsed and the content of the JSON is shown in the JSON Data field.
Next, you drag your template in the Template section and finally, you select the Output you want and hit the Process button.


You can now remove the template and drag-and-drop a new version of the template and hit the Process button again. This way you can quickly see the result while making changes to the template.

Web Editor in AOP On-Premises version

If you download the AOP On-Premises version and run the AOP Server (which is one executable) locally, or you navigate to the server URL where your AOP Server is running, you will see the AOP Web Editor.


This editor is really powerful and has more features than the Quick Template Changer you find in the AOP Sample App. Just as before you drag-and-drop the JSON file in the Exported JSON section.

The AOP Web Editor will parse the JSON and will show a link to the template to Download (unnamed.docx). If you want to change the Template, you just drag-and-drop another template in the Template section. On this screen, you can even prepend and append files and add sub-templates. If you don't like to always select a file from the file system, you can select all files or even a directory and drag-and-drop it entirely in the File cache section, so you can swap files even quicker!


Select the Output and hit the Process button, and presto, you see the output with the (new) template!

But that is not all, you can also change the Data on the fly by going into the Data tab:


Or see the new resulting JSON file after changing the data and template:


In case you want some examples, hit the Load Sample button and select a sample.

I really believe the AOP Web Editor will help you a lot in your development of AOP Reports.

This AOP Web Editor app is actually a nice showcase that AOP can be used with any technology. The Web Editor is written with React.js.

Hope this helps you to be even more productive with AOP!

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Alternative for Oracle Multimedia: APEX Media Extension

If you are reading this blog post you are probably searching for an alternative for the deprecated multimedia (or intermedia) feature of the Oracle Database... and you are in the right post as APEX Media Extension is that replacement!

Just like you, I loved the Oracle Multimedia feature in the Oracle Database. I used the feature in many different applications, mostly related to images. For example, when some students upload images of their work in an Oracle APEX app, or teachers upload images to include in tests, I made thumbnails of the images and resized them so they fit really nicely on the page.

Unfortunately, Oracle announced starting in Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Multimedia is deprecated. You can still use it, but you know it will go away at some point... and that is what happened with Oracle Database 19c. Oracle Multimedia is now desupported and doesn't even work anymore. The Oracle Multimedia packages are still there, so your code is still compiling and valid, but it's not doing anything anymore.

Just like you and others, I reviewed and tested different alternatives, but to make a long story short, I wasn't completely happy with any of them. So we at APEX R&D decided to offer a solution that is easy to use and fully supported. There's a PL/SQL API so you can use it just like Oracle Multimedia from the Oracle Database. As we love Oracle APEX, we also provide two APEX Plug-ins: one plug-in which sits on top of the PL/SQL API (which is a server-based solution) and another one which is a pure client-side (JavaScript) implementation. Our goal is that it's as easy as possible to integrate this solution into your Oracle Database and/or APEX app. We named this solution APEX Media Extension and it will be available before the end of the year (2019).


In this initial release, we've focussed on converting media, such as:
  • resizing images
  • cropping images
  • adding watermarks to images
  • compressing images 
  • changing image formats (jpg, png, ...)
We are eager to hear where else you use Oracle Multimedia!

BUT that is not all... we decided to include this functionality also in APEX Office Print (AOP) (Gold and Enterprise versions)!  So, if you already use AOP, in our upcoming version you are fully covered already :)

Interested? Please leave your email on the APEX Media Extension website and you will be first to know when it's released.

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Free Oracle Cloud: 16. Renewing Let's Encrypt certificate

When you followed along with my series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud you most likely will have gotten an email from Let's Encrypt that your certificate is due for renewal.


To check your certificate, go to your site in a browser and click on the lock:


Yep, corresponds to the email, in 10 days my certificate will expire.

Let's get this fixed! So connect with ssh to your Compute instance (see the previous post in the series if you forgot those commands).

When I connect to my machines I typically first run yum update to get the latest packages installed so we are current with security patches, or just, in general, keep up with the latest software.

sudo su (to become root)
yum update


Time to renew our certificate. It's very easy to do, run

certbot certonly


Ha! Apparently not so simple after all?! We got an error. This might happen when packages are incompatible. Normally yum should take care of that, but as we installed Certbot with Pip, let's upgrade all those components too.

pip install -U pip

As the above error indicates an issue with cryptography, I will update that too.

pip install cryptography --upgrade


Now, let's try to renew our certificate again:

certbot certonly

and type your domain name(s):



Cool, that worked... your certificate is now updated.

To get the new certificate active we restart the webserver (after testing if all is ok):

nginx -t
nginx -s reload



Finally, we check the certificate in a browser to see if the new one is there:


All done, time to relax again for a couple of months.

Update: Morten made the remark why not to automate the renewal:


It's a great comment! When you look at the Certbot instructions, it actually gives you the steps to auto-renew, so you might have already done that. I actually have this running on some of our servers, but I didn't include this step in my initial blog post when we configured the webserver.
So, in case you didn't set up the automatic renewal, or the automatic renewal failed, you have the steps above to fix it.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

I don't like Black Friday, but AOP is doing it anyway!

Most people love Black Friday, but I don't. Many companies give  huge discounts the day after Thanksgiving, but I always feel stupid and have a bad taste whenever I see discounts. I just bought those nice pants and the week after they are on sale for 40%. Really? I typically buy things when I need them, so I don't really pay attention to time. It's happened more than once that I've bought something and in the next few days, the same item was on sale for a discount. I always feel so stupid then and feel like I paid too much.

I guess for certain articles that are seasonal, I can understand people want to get rid of the stock, so they give discounts. For B2C it might make sense, but for B2B I don't get it. Why would a service be worth less when you buy on a specific day? Most businesses in the US are closed on Black Friday, so not sure how they would buy something?

Anyway, the AOP Team had a discussion in the office if we should do a deal for Black Friday. Here's what they said: "YES, please let us make a deal and play with the other Black Friday children 😃 It’s just like getting a costume and going out and Trick-orTreating with the other kids on Halloween ðŸ˜Ž"

Although I don't get it, I will put my pride aside and follow the team this year.

For one day, APEX Office Print will give a discount on the Cloud Silver and On-Premises Silver and Gold packages. Click this link to see the offer.


As I want it to be extra special and not just give a discount, we will also donate 50 USD per sale for any sale that is done on Black Friday to Make-A-Wish.

Happy Black Friday!

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

Free Oracle Cloud: 15. The request could not be mapped to any database

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

At some point you might face the following message: "The request could not be mapped to any database":


Oracle is monitoring usage on your Always Free Account and whenever it finds there's no activity for 7 days, it will stop your database automatically. It will preserve the data in the database, but it won't be accessible anymore.

To fix the issue, log in to your Oracle Cloud Account and go to your Autonomous Database:


You will see the database is in a stopped state. Click the Start button:


The state will change to Starting...


And after a minute it becomes available again:


The above behavior is written in the end-user documentation:
Inactivity Monitoring and Database Stoppage
Persistently inactive Always Free Autonomous Databases are detected and handled as follows:
  • After being inactive for 7 days, the database will be stopped automatically, preserving its stored data. Inactivity measurements leading up to 7 days are based on database connections. Successfully making a SQL*Net or HTTPS connection resets these measurements to zero.
  • A database that is automatically or manually stopped and stays inactive for 90 days, cumulative, may be reclaimed and permanently deleted. Inactivity measurements leading up to 90 days are based on the database being inactive or in the stopped state. Starting a stopped database resets these measurements to zero.
    Start an Always Free Autonomous Database by clicking the Start button on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console. Start a stopped Always Free Autonomous Database before 90 days to avoid losing access to its data.

But this week there were some people complaining that although they had activity, their database was stopped anyway. I witnessed the same behavior in my account, so I reached out to Oracle and they confirmed their code to identify inactivity, is not properly accounting for APEX/ORDS usage. They are already working on a fix, which they hope to apply very soon. I will update this post when I get confirmation the fix is in the data centers.

Update December 10th: Oracle rolled out a fix end of November to take ORDS and APEX activity in the usage data into account. So whenever you have a REST call or APEX page load, your service should not expire. So far this fixed helped the issue I had in my environment and my instance has not been stopped anymore.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Native Oracle DB JSON functionality as alternative for using cursor() in AOP (and APEX_JSON)

When using external (WEB/REST) services, you often communicate in JSON. So it's important to be able to generate JSON in the format that is expected by the external service.

In the case of APEX Office Print (AOP), we made it super simple to communicate with the AOP server from the database through our PL/SQL API. You just have to enter a SQL statement and the AOP PL/SQL API, which uses APEX_JSON behind the scenes, generates the necessary JSON that the AOP Server understands.

Here's an example of the Order data in JSON: a customer with multiple orders and multiple order lines:

As we are living in the Oracle database, we have to generate this JSON. The data is coming from different tables and is hierarchical. In SQL you can create hierarchical data by using the cursor() syntax.

Here's an example of the SQL statement that you would typically use in AOP (the cursor highlighted in red):

select
  'file1' as "filename", 
  cursor(
    select
      c.cust_first_name as "cust_first_name",
      c.cust_last_name  as "cust_last_name",
      c.cust_city       as "cust_city",
      cursor(select o.order_total      as "order_total", 
                    'Order ' || rownum as "order_name",
                cursor(select p.product_name as "product_name", 
                              i.quantity     as "quantity",
                              i.unit_price   as "unit_price"
                         from demo_order_items i, demo_product_info p
                        where o.order_id = i.order_id
                          and i.product_id = p.product_id
                      ) "order_lines"
               from demo_orders o
              where c.customer_id = o.customer_id
            ) "orders"
    from demo_customers c
    where customer_id = 1
  ) "data"
from dual

From AOP 19.3 onwards, the AOP PL/SQL API not only supports this cursor() syntax but also the native JSON functionality of the Oracle Database (version 12c and upwards).

The query above can also be written as the following using JSON support in the Oracle Database:

select 
  json_arrayagg( 
    json_object( 
      'filename' value 'file1', 
      'data'     value (
          select 
            json_arrayagg(
              json_object( 
                'cust_first_name' value c.cust_first_name, 
                'cust_last_name'  value c.cust_last_name,
                'cust_city'       value c.cust_city, 
                'orders'          value (
                    select 
                      json_arrayagg(
                        json_object(                               
                          'order_total' value o.order_total, 
                          'order_name'  value 'Order ' || rownum,
                          'order_lines' value (
                              select 
                                json_arrayagg(
                                  json_object(                               
                                    'product_name' value p.product_name, 
                                    'quantity'     value i.quantity,
                                    'unit_price'   value i.unit_price
                                  )
                                returning clob)      
                                from demo_order_items i, demo_product_info p
                               where o.order_id = i.order_id
                                 and i.product_id = p.product_id
                            )
                        )
                      returning clob)      
                      from demo_orders o
                    where o.customer_id = c.customer_id
                  )
              )
            returning clob)  
            from demo_customers c
            where c.customer_id = 1
          )
    )
  returning clob) as aop_json
  from dual 

You have to get used to this syntax and have to think a bit differently. Unlike the cursor syntax where you define the column first and give it an alias, using the JSON functions, you define the JSON object and attributes first and then map it to the correct column.

I find the cursor syntax really elegant, especially in combination with APEX_JSON, it's a really cool solution to generate the JSON you need. But I guess it's a personal choice what you prefer and I must admit, the more I use the native JSON way, the more I like it. If performance is important you most likely want to use native database functionality as much as possible, but I go in more detail further in this post. Lino also found an issue with the cursor syntax in the Oracle Database 19c, so if you are on that database release you want to look at the support document.

Before I move on with my test case, if you need more info on JSON in the database: Carsten did a nice blog post about parsing JSON in APEX, and although it's about parsing JSON and this blog post is more about generating JSON, the conclusions are similar. You can read more about APEX_JSON and the native JSON database functions in Tim's write-up on Oracle-Base.

As I was interested in the performance of both implementations, I run a few test cases. There are different ways to test performance, e.g. use dbms_profiler, Method R Workbench, trace, timing the results, ... Below I use Tom Kyte's script to compare two PL/SQL implementations. The interesting thing with the script it's not only comparing timings but also latches, which give you an idea of how hard the database has to work. You can download it from AskTom under the resources section:


Here's my test script:

declare
  l_sql             clob;
  l_return          blob;
  l_output_filename varchar2(100);  
  l_runs            number(5) := 1;
begin
  runStats_pkg.rs_start;
  
  -- sql example with cursor
  for i in 1..l_runs
  loop
      l_output_filename := 'cursor';
      l_sql := q'[
                select
                'file1' as "filename",
                cursor
                (select 
                    c.cust_first_name as "cust_first_name",
                    c.cust_last_name  as "cust_last_name",
                    c.cust_city       as "cust_city"
                   from demo_customers c
                  where c.customer_id = 1 
                ) as "data"
                from dual   
               ]';
      l_return := aop_api_pkg.plsql_call_to_aop (
                    p_data_type       => aop_api_pkg.c_source_type_sql,
                    p_data_source     => l_sql,
                    p_template_type   => aop_api_pkg.c_source_type_aop_template,
                    p_output_type     => 'docx',
                    p_output_filename => l_output_filename,
                    p_aop_remote_debug=> aop_api_pkg.c_debug_local); 
  end loop;  
  
  runStats_pkg.rs_middle;  
  
  -- sql example with native JSON database functionality
  for i in 1..l_runs
  loop
      l_output_filename := 'native_json';
      l_sql := q'[
                select 
                  json_arrayagg( 
                    json_object( 
                      'filename' value 'file1', 
                      'data'     value (select 
                                          json_arrayagg(
                                            json_object( 
                                              'cust_first_name' value c.cust_first_name, 
                                              'cust_last_name'  value c.cust_last_name,
                                              'cust_city'       value c.cust_city 
                                            )
                                          )  
                                          from demo_customers c
                                         where c.customer_id = 1
                                       )  
                    )
                  ) as aop_json
                  from dual 
               ]';
      l_return := aop_api_pkg.plsql_call_to_aop (
                    p_data_type       => aop_api_pkg.c_source_type_sql,
                    p_data_source     => l_sql,
                    p_template_type   => aop_api_pkg.c_source_type_aop_template,
                    p_output_type     => 'docx',
                    p_output_filename => l_output_filename,
                    p_aop_remote_debug=> aop_api_pkg.c_debug_local);                     
  end loop;    

  runStats_pkg.rs_stop;   
end;
/

I ran the script (with different l_runs settings) a few times on my 18c database and with the above use case on my system, the native JSON implementation was consistently outperforming the cursor (and APEX_JSON) implementation.

Run1 ran in 3 cpu hsecs
Run2 ran in 2 cpu hsecs
run 1 ran in 150% of the time

Name                                  Run1        Run2        Diff
STAT...HSC Heap Segment Block           40          41           1
STAT...Heap Segment Array Inse          40          41           1
STAT...Elapsed Time                      4           3          -1
STAT...CPU used by this sessio           4           3          -1
STAT...redo entries                     40          41           1
STAT...non-idle wait time                0           1           1
LATCH.simulator hash latch              27          26          -1
STAT...non-idle wait count              13          12          -1
STAT...consistent gets examina          41          43           2
LATCH.redo allocation                    1           3           2
STAT...active txn count during          21          23           2
STAT...cleanout - number of kt          21          23           2
LATCH.transaction allocation             1           3           2
LATCH.In memory undo latch               1           3           2
LATCH.JS Sh mem access                   1           3           2
STAT...consistent gets examina          41          43           2
LATCH.keiut hash table modific           3           0          -3
STAT...calls to kcmgcs                  64          69           5
STAT...dirty buffers inspected           6           0          -6
STAT...workarea executions - o           2          12          10
STAT...free buffer requested            71          52         -19
STAT...lob writes unaligned             80          60         -20
STAT...lob writes                       80          60         -20
STAT...sorts (rows)                      0          20          20
STAT...execute count                    91          71         -20
STAT...sorts (memory)                    0          20          20
LATCH.active service list                0          25          25
STAT...consistent gets                 183         156         -27
STAT...consistent gets from ca         183         156         -27
STAT...consistent gets pin (fa         142         113         -29
STAT...consistent gets pin             142         113         -29
STAT...lob reads                       160         130         -30
LATCH.JS queue state obj latch           0          42          42
LATCH.object queue header oper         151         103         -48
STAT...workarea memory allocat          66          -6         -72
STAT...db block changes                431         358         -73
STAT...consistent changes              390         315         -75
LATCH.parameter table manageme          80           0         -80
STAT...undo change vector size       8,748       8,832          84
LATCH.enqueue hash chains                1          88          87
STAT...parse count (total)             100          10         -90
STAT...session cursor cache hi         171          71        -100
STAT...opened cursors cumulati         171          71        -100
STAT...free buffer inspected           126           0        -126
STAT...calls to get snapshot s         470         330        -140
STAT...db block gets from cach         958         744        -214
STAT...hot buffers moved to he         220           0        -220
STAT...redo size                    12,016      12,248         232
STAT...db block gets                 1,039         806        -233
STAT...db block gets from cach       1,029         796        -233
STAT...session logical reads         1,222         962        -260
STAT...file io wait time             5,865       6,279         414
STAT...recursive calls                 561         131        -430
LATCH.cache buffers chains           3,224       2,521        -703
STAT...session uga memory          196,456           0    -196,456
STAT...session pga memory        1,572,864           0  -1,572,864
STAT...logical read bytes from   9,928,704   7,798,784  -2,129,920

Run1 latches total versus runs -- difference and pct
        Run1        Run2        Diff       Pct
       3,853       3,180        -673    121.16%

There are many different iterations of this test, using bind variables, etc. It seems "logical" that a native DB implementation is better performance-wise than a combination of PL/SQL (APEX_JSON) and SQL (cursor). But I always recommend you just run the test in your own environment. What is true today, might be different tomorrow and a lot comes into play, so if there's one thing I learned from Tom Kyte, it's don't take things for granted, but test in your unique situation.

So, in real life using AOP, will you see a big difference? It depends on the complexity of your SQL statement and data, how many times you call a report etc. but my guess is, in most cases, it's probably not much of a difference in user experience.

A simple test would be to do "set timing on" and compare the implementations:


Or if you are using AOP on an Oracle APEX page, you can run your APEX page in Debug mode and you will see exactly how long the generation of the JSON took for the data part:


Happy JSON'ing :)