Roels Blog

So what are my experiences using EECS doing some APEX work? First of all, it is not blazing fast. Probably caused by the latency (as mentioned in my previous post). It is not slow, it is just ok('ish).  Second, and way more important, it runs APEX 5.0.4 ! So whatever Oracle advertises about " Cloud first " ... it doesn't seem to apply to APEX (or APEX on EECS). So this fact alone makes this environment useless for demo, development and presentation purposes at this moment. I heard through the grapevine that 5.1 will be available from April 25 - but that's still a month away. And that rumour could be false. Third, because you don't have access to a SYS account, you can't install something like APEX-SERT . Maybe the install scripts can be adapted for the PDB_ADMIN account - I haven't looked into that yet. Four : As mentioned in an earlier post, within an EECS PDB instance you get one and only one APEX Workspace. You can't add one (no...

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 ...

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...