MakSoft Blog

Oracle : What is APEX ?

APEX is a great Oracle product, yet some-how is under-rated.

Think of APEX for Oracle the same as Access is for Microsoft. It is light-weight-declarative tool to build database applications without much coding.

If you embrace this analogy between APEX and Access, then allow me to introduce APEX by comparing it to ACCESS.

In Access: VBA is used to build macros, yet in APEX uses PL/SQL.
In Access: Forms and Reports are the main GUI containers, yet in APEX: Web Pages and Report regions are the main containers.
Access has a its own database and DBMS, yet APEX is based on an Oracle server that acts as the DBMS and Web application server (actually Apache is implicitly installed).
Access has size limitation on DBMS, But since APEX is based on Oracle, it is already up-scaled when it comes to database size. Yet I would consult Oracle first about the APEX scale limitations for Web-serving.
In APEX you could build an Web Application or Web-Service rather easily. unlike Access which requires further IIS or any ASP host to be web-enabled.
APEX is installed by default with every DBMS Oracle server installed.
In Access to connect to other databases by ADO and External Tables but in APEX the only way to connect to Databases other than the local one, DB-LINKS are the only option. Which is sometimes a pain in the neck because of how the SQL optimizer behaves (unpredictable Explain Plan when linking to an Oracle DB of a different release).

The Idea is: To build web-applications based on the local Oracle DB.

There are many PL/SQL packages available in APEX to help better “macro” the tasks and processes.

In this article I did not intend to tutor APEX, I rather intend to make you aware of its existence.

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