APEX Application Development FAQ

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General questions

What is Oracle APEX Application Development?

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.

Why is Oracle APEX Service referred to as a low-code application development framework?

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.

What is Oracle APEX Service used for?

Oracle APEX Service serves a wide range of use cases:

  • Build applications that present a unified view of data in interactive reports, data visualizations, dashboards, and more. Easily create applications suitable for specific line of business users, departments, or the entire organization.
  • Replace error-prone spreadsheets with fully populated tables in Oracle Database and corresponding APEX applications that provide a single source of truth.
  • Create bespoke applications for diverse business scenarios and industries. Quickly iterate, test, and review applications with end users.
  • Rapidly build applications for external users such as partners and customers or provide custom REST endpoints for sharing application data.
  • Modernize existing Oracle Forms applications without having to worry about usability and accessibility. Substitute a contemporary, browser-based, and mobile-friendly user interface.

Who should use Oracle APEX Service?

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.

How can Oracle APEX Service simplify application development?

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.

Oracle APEX is available on all Oracle Databases. Are applications built on different Oracle APEX environments compatible with Oracle APEX Service?

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.

Is Oracle APEX Service available in all Oracle Cloud regions?

Oracle APEX Service is widely available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions throughout the world. Please check your specific region.

How does Oracle APEX Service scale to accommodate dynamic workloads?

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.

How is Oracle APEX Service priced?

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. 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.

For how long is each release of Oracle APEX supported?

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.

What are the advantages of Oracle APEX Service over other offerings available in the marketplace?

Oracle APEX Service is unique and offers several advantages :

  • In-database. The engine of Oracle APEX Service runs within an enterprise database, in close proximity to application data, which means that apps can be executed with maximum performance and scalability. This in-database architecture streamlines the technology stack, eliminating complexity from applications at multiple levels.
  • Autonomous. Oracle APEX Service includes Oracle Autonomous Database, a self-managing database preconfigured on highly available database servers. It automatically configures, tunes, patches, scales elastically, and backs up data. It also detects and repairs the stack from failures and significantly improves operating efficiency. Other low-code tools require DBAs and DevOps to perform these tasks, resulting in significantly higher costs.
  • Available everywhere. Applications built using Oracle APEX Service are highly transportable across cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments. Users can easily deploy and run applications directly in Oracle APEX Service, and if needed, migrate them to other environments where Oracle Database is available.
  • Low cost. Oracle APEX Service is a fully managed, low-code solution that provides a small Always Free version and a full paid version (starting at just US$122 per month for 2 ECPU and 20 GB of Exadata storage). Each ECPU of the paid service can support thousands of application page views per hour. Most other low-code tools charge per application, user, developer, or workspace, which results in significantly higher costs as applications scale.

How can I estimate my monthly Oracle APEX Service consumption costs?

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.

Where can I track metrics such as health and utilization that are associated with Oracle APEX Service?

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.

Does Oracle APEX Service have any limitations?

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.

Where can I find detailed information about Oracle APEX Service features?

Visit our documentation center for details.