Roels Blog

The original blogpost will appear again "soon"... Update : The stuff that was originally up here is now rewritten in the posts on "Oracle NoSQL Database" and the "Big Data Appliance".

Within one week San Francisco will be colored "Oracle red" again for Oracle Open World - including Oracle Develop and JavaOne. Around 50,000 - usually easy to recognize - attendees will cover the streets, while moving from one conference location to the other. And I am privileged to be one of them! In fact, I am even more privileged to attend the Oracle ACE Director briefing at Oracle HQ in Redwood on Thursday and Friday before the big event... So that will make about 1.5 week in the Bay Area. Creating a schedule for OOW is as difficult as ever. No matter what tools they provide, the endless possibilities of picking that most interesting session amongst the 100 in the same time slot is cumbersome. And then there are all the "social events"... it is hard to pick the right one there too, because there is a large amount of overlap as well. But I managed...and created this schedule for that week - where orange = APEX, green = social and the rest is....well, the rest. ...

I just deployed an APEX Application from one development to a test server. Therefore I used the great "Database Unload" feature of SQL Developer: it generates a script with all DDL and data - or a subset if you wish. I also used the "Quick DDL" option for creating a APEX Export file from with SQL Developer. Installation was a breeze, just run those two scripts and you're done... You think... But then I noticed something strange...in my Interactive Reports I only saw the ID's of the foreign key columns, instead of the description. And it wasn't just one, it was all over the place! It seemed that the SQL Dev export didn't handle the IR-columns that are defined as "Display as Text (based on LOV)" with a Named List of Values properly. The Named List of Values was just missing from the column definition. I don't know if this is solved in version 4.1 (as I was running 4.0.2 on this box), but be aware... Also - and that may be more obvious ...

When you develop your APEX application using the APEX Listener or OHS, it is a good habit to create a separate (sub)folder to serve your images - and other files - into your application. Usually the name of the subfolder reflects the name of the application. So you reference these images, like an "enabled" image in your application by '#IMAGE_PREFIX#my-app/enabled.png'. So far so good. But now you need to deploy this to a server that is using the Embedded PLSQL Gateway (EPG)? How to serve these images into that application without changing your code? Uploading the images the regular way into the workspace or application doesn't help, because you won't get the subdirectory prefix. The only way (I know of) is to upload these images into the XML-DB Repository.  So I created this script - feel free to use, edit or whatever you want to do with it (no guarantees!):