Roels Blog

Nowadays Docker is everywhere. It is one of the main components of Continuous Integration / Continuous Development environments. That alone indicates Docker has to be seen more as a Software Delivery Platform than as a replacement of a virtual machine. However ... If you are running an Oracle database using Docker on your local machine to develop some APEX application, you will probably not move that container is a whole to test and production environments. Because in that case you would not only deliver a new APEX application to the production environment - which is a good thing - but also overwrite the data in production with the data from your development environment. And that won't make your users very excited. So in this set up you will be using Docker as a replacement of a Virtual Machine and not as a Delivery Platform. And that's exactly the way Martin is using it as he described in this recent blog post . It is an ideal way to get up and running with an Oracle d...

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 ...

Using the Preferences of SQL Developer you can register a User Defined Extension (UDE). This UDE is just a small XML file containing a command or query. If your Oracle Designer Repository is queriable by the user you use for your connection, you can show the Table Definitions in Designer alongside the definitions in the Oracle Database. You just have to create an XML file containing this code: Register the file as an 'EDITOR' type in SQL Developer using Tools / Preferences / Database / User Defined Extensions. Restart SQLDev and the result is something like: Is it usefull? Not really with this query, but you can extend the query with a lot of other data, for example to list the modules a table is used in or the column definitions of that table!