Oracle APEX Application Development (APEX Service) is a preconfigured, fully managed, and secured low-code application development platform for building and deploying modern, data-driven applications on Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Oracle APEX Service enables professional and citizen developers to build sophisticated applications that work on any device with a modern web browser—without having to become an expert in traditional coding or a vast array of web technologies. Its declarative, metadata-driven architecture combined with powerful, packaged UI components greatly simplify application development. In fact, a recent study from Pique Solutions (PDF) showed that developers could build enterprise applications 38X faster with Oracle APEX Service.
Oracle APEX Service serves a wide range of use cases:
Oracle APEX Service empowers all kinds of users—line of business analysts, departmental developers, citizen application developers, and professional developers—to easily build compelling apps with superior functionality, performance, and security. It lets users focus on solving business problems and not on complex coding techniques.
Oracle APEX Service eliminates the complexity of developing and deploying applications at multiple layers. A rich, browser-based, intuitive graphical interface guides users through the creation of applications. Powerful UI components enable developers to add a high-level of functionality to apps with limited coding. Oracle APEX Service includes an Oracle Autonomous Database where application state is managed and logic is executed. Oracle Autonomous Database provides complete database lifecycle management, so there is no need for a DBA or DevOps to administer databases. The result is a low-code platform that is simple, fast, secure, lightweight, and highly available.
With Oracle APEX, developers can build and deploy applications everywhere that Oracle Database runs including on-premises and in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud@Customer, Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, and third-party clouds. Moreover, Oracle APEX makes it easy to migrate applications between on-premises environments and multicloud, hybrid cloud, or pure cloud environments. Applications built using Oracle APEX in environments different from Oracle APEX Service typically will run on this service without modification.
Oracle APEX Service is widely available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions throughout the world. Please check your specific region.
Each Oracle APEX Service instance is preconfigured with a fault-tolerant and highly available Oracle Autonomous Database. The service can elastically scale compute and storage resources, manually or automatically, without application downtime to meet performance requirements of dynamic workloads. Oracle Autonomous Database takes care of configuration, tuning, backups, patching, encryption, scaling, and much more—enabling users to focus on building applications.
Oracle APEX Service offers tremendous value for the price. Its entry-level pricing starts at US$122 per month for 2 ECPU and 20 GB of Exadata storage (running continuously for 31 days). As applications grow over time, the cost of the service is still low, due to APEX Service’s pay-per-use and all-inclusive pricing. Note that the service does not charge per application, user, developer, or workspace. Data transfer into and out of the service (ingress and egress) is included at no extra cost. These characteristics are unique compared to low-code tools from other vendors. Additionally, a small Always Free version of APEX Service is available in Oracle Cloud Free Tier, making it easy to get familiar with the service at no cost. Please check the pricing page for more details.
Oracle APEX is supported for 18 months. Oracle APEX ships with several open source libraries, including Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET). These libraries are frequently updated, and bug fixes are only available with the most recent releases of these libraries. Oracle’s support policy for APEX was changed to 18 months to align with Oracle and industry standards.
Oracle APEX is also available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as part of the APEX Service and Autonomous Database. Both services are fully managed by Oracle and new versions of APEX are available on-premises and on OCI at the same time. Customers can choose to upgrade APEX at any time within the first 90 days after the release. After this time, Oracle APEX gets upgraded automatically.
For additional details and support end dates by release, please refer to APEX Support.
Oracle APEX Service is unique and offers several advantages compared to other low-code tools:
It is easy to estimate the cost of Oracle APEX Service with Oracle’s intuitive Cost Estimator. Visit the Cost Estimator page, and within Application Development, add Oracle APEX. Then adjust your ECPU and storage needs to get an approximate cost of the service. Note that the small Always Free version of APEX Service is available to Oracle Cloud users at no cost.
Oracle APEX Service is native to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and as such, it offers several heath monitoring capabilities. Overview and activity tabs in the service console provide information about database usage. In addition, APEX-specific metrics such as page load times and top active applications provide helpful details about APEX activity within the instance.
Oracle APEX Service currently does not support Oracle Net Services (SQL*Net) connectivity and does not allow direct access to the preconfigured REST-SQL interface. If applications evolve to require these capabilities, customers can perform a single-click upgrade to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing with APEX included and full support for SQL*Net and REST-SQL. For details, see the service documentation.
Visit our documentation center for details.