Roels Blog

Thanks to a tweet of Scott Wesley (@swesley_perth), I stumbled upon this blog post by Tony Andrews. In that blog Tony lists a few examples of APEX Conditions and concludes that the declarative approach must be the best way of doing it. Although his assumptions and conclusions makes a lot of sense, I wondered whether it was actually true and what the difference in performance would be. So I created a very similar test myself and take a look at the debug output. And here are the results (in microseconds) ... Type Statement Run 1 Run 2 Declarative ...<nothing here>... 653 667 PL/SQL Expression "...Execute Statement: begin wwv_flow.g_boolean := :P3_JOB_ID = 'AD_PRES'; end;” 1533 1823 SQL Exists ...Execute Statement: select count(*) from sys.dual where exists (SELECT NULL FROM DUAL WHERE :P3_JOB_ID = 'AD_PRES') 1684 2023 PL/SQL Function """...Execute Statement: declare function x return boolean is begin be

One of my current customers would like to use their LDAP (Microsoft Active Directory) server for authentication and authorization of APEX applications. Of course we tried to set up a standard LDAP Authenication that's available within APEX. But we couldn't get that to work. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the client stored their Users within Groups within Groups within .... . Or maybe it doesn't do a full tree walk in the directory. Or maybe it is just because it is Microsoft - and not Oracle Internet Directory (OID). So we moved to a custom Authentication using the DBMS_LDAP functions (and some examples from the Pro Oracle Application Express book and Tim Hall - a.k.a. Oracle Base ). One of the issues we encountered that we wanted to use the user's login name, like "jdoe" and not his full name ("John Doe"). And the login name is stored in the "sAMAccountName" attribute. But authenticating using just "jdoe" didn't w