Roels Blog

Once you have defined your users for your Express Cloud Service, all users with the role of Database Developer or higher can access the database Service Console. From here all database related actions can be started. The upper category, Web Access, brings you to the specified part of the APEX builder - more on that in the next post. In the lower category you can create database schema's. For our goal within smart4apex, I created a schema for every developer. You can define whether the schema should be accessible from within APEX and creating an separate tablespace is optional. I haven't played around with the Document Store yet, so I have to skip that part. You can also set the password of the administrator of your PDB - the most privileged user within your PDB you have access to. Franck Pachot did an excellent writeup about the privileges of that user. I hoped the "Manage Application Express" would bring me to the "APEX Admin" environment - a.k.a. ...

Once you get your services up and running, you can log into your domain - in this screenhot "smart4apex" - on the Oracle Cloud. Then you'll end up in the "My Services" dashboard. As I have only one, my dashboard looks quite clean, showing just this widget: Just a few remarks for the designers of this: I am very curious why there is an extra " (Number of ..."  in the chart title. The same superflous text is also on another location on that page. And, more intriguing, what would "0.0323 database instances" mean? 1/0.0323 = 31. So something like days? But February has 28 days... It would make way more sense to just show here how many instances I had on those day (so, "1" al over the place...). From this widget you can drill into the "Service Details", where you can set rules and alerts and see the (historical) status of your instance. Funny thing is, I noticed this: These figures indicate, I have a storage limit ...

We upgraded our environment from 11.2 to 12c last week. This week we noticed an error in one of our APEX pages, a rather simple form for entering data. Nothing fancy, nothing spectacular - only a spectacular error when you tried to edit a record.  Running the page in debug mode (even on LEVEL9) wasn't very helpful as you can see below (10 points who immediately spots the error!). The error didn't occur for all records. It seems that a long(er) Code and Description field on the page resulted in an error more frequently. Also fiddling with a couple of the checkbox fields on the page had an effect. So I asked Twitter for help. And within a few minutes I got all kinds of tips and advice. But especially one, from Peter Raganitsch  was spot on. He suggested, looking at the debug output above, to take a look at the #CLOSE# position in the template. . My buttons are positioned in that #CLOSE# position, so I took a closer look at those. There were three that passed the Id, Co...

The Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service was announced at Oracle Open World 2016. This service looks like an excellent use case for Oracle Database development purposes as well as setting up a test environment. And even for small to medium sized production situations it looks very promising as you can see in the table below. Especially the cheapest option offers a lot of bang for your bucks. But alas, this service was not as widely available as I expected. The first months it was US-only and you could only figure out by ordering the service and then you would find out on the last page that you should "contact your Oracle sales rep". I sincerely doubt whether he or she could provide you with that service, so I just waited until it would be more generally available. And since a few weeks the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service is also available in Europe - I don't know about other parts of the world. A missed chance though that Oracle didn't announce that proper...