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Oracle Application Express (ApEx) Analysis
August 18, 2017

Oracle Application Express (ApEx) Analysis

Paolo Borghi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Application Express

Oracle Application Express, or ApEx, is a web interface offered for free by Oracle (is included in the database) to interact through a browser with other applications, Oracle or not. In my company, I work as a business intelligence consultant by developing with Oracle back-end tools (like Oracle Database, Oracle Data Integrator, FDMEE), and I've had many occasions of seeing the potentialities of Oracle Application Express.

Thanks to its versatility, ApEx is able to solve many kinds of business problems, like - small reporting, through the implementations of simple and navigable reports; - database writing, through many kinds of forms; - web-service (Oracle and non) invocations; - creating charts and data based diagrams. ApEx is a really flexible tool that can interact with many different technologies, has a lot of plugins and is fully accessible from a browser, both from a desktop platform and from mobile.
  • Installation included for free with Oracle Database
  • Easy to access from a browser, both from desktop and from mobile
  • Simple web based interface for development
  • Easy to learn, with a good variety of functionalities already implemented and customizable
  • Able to interact with Oracle back-end technologies and with many third parties web tools
  • Sometimes it is so simple that it doesn't offer the desired functionality
  • At the beginning it may be a bit difficult to work with the customizations required starting from the basic applications offered inside the installation
  • It may be difficult to insert "advanced" customizations on the page (eg: web scripting for effects or popups)
  • ApEx license if free, since the product comes with Oracle Database, so it doesn't itself involve an investment
  • ApEx, for its simplicity, has a really good impact on business (non-technical) users, on access to technical appliances
  • ApEx development is simple to learn, as well as to use
I've experimented some fully custom applications, made with web technologies and Java. For sure they were more powerful than ApEx, but they cost more in terms of development days and of maintenance since they were quite complex. ApEx, instead, is really simple and its knowledge can be transferred fast. Both of these technologies fit in different situations, depending on requirements, budget and time at disposal for the implementation. But for sure, since consulting is always racing against time, I think that ApEx wins in almost all the occasions.
ApEx is a fantastic tool to create web pages (the easiest access point for anything) for users. It can be mainly used to create reports or insert forms on small database tables or for invoking web-services from other tools or integrating other web tools. For example, it may be used as a monitor for Oracle Data Integrator flows, directly selecting logs from the ODI work repository or from custom tables. Moreover, through the invocations of ODI agent web-service, ApEx also allows us to execute ODI flows (keep an eye on agent license for this purpose). Finally, and the simplest scenario, it can be used to directly write inside a table or loading a file in it. On the contrary, ApEx is not suited at all as a reporting tool, since its pagination and graphical rearrangement are quite limited.