APEX Connect 2025 (Day 2)

This year I can unfortunately only attend APEX Connect for 2 days, starting on Day 2 of the conference.
Conference is hosted in the famous EuropaPark.
The Day has started with the traditional 5K run (which ended up to be 5.8 km in fact) to wake-up the body with fresh air and nice sunshine.
After the “Welcome 2nd Day APEX Connect & Opening of the DB Conference, DOAG e.V.”, and the Keynote “Mehr über Oracle’s Release 23ai – immer noch ohne Folien & Marketing, dafür aber zu 100% Demos”, I decided to attend presentations on following topics:
– Fortgeschrittene API-Entwicklung mit Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS)
– Search Images by Images in your APEX application with AI Vector Search
– Sponsored Session: Revolutionizing Oracle APEX: United Codes’ Innovative Solutions
– Single Sign-On: One Login for All Your Needs
– Dev Talk: Die Trivadis PL/SQL & SQL Coding Guidelines sind tot – was nun?
And the day ended by the Evening Event: “Dinner at the french themed area” of the park followed by a party with a DJ.

Fortgeschrittene API-Entwicklung mit Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS)

REST APIs deserve careful design and looking into them from a consumer point of view can help a lot in this exercise. REST APIs have a grammar made of Nouns (preferred to be plural) to show what it is about, verbs given by the HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) and relations to sub-resources.It is very important to try them, test them and document them properly with tools like Swagger/OpenAPI.
ORDS provides already a lot of help allowing to develop them, but sometimes custom PL/SQL is required which should be as light as possible due to the numerous calls they can get.
Authentication is another critical point which should be managed with JWT (JSON Web Token) on Pre-hook or oAuth2. This integrates well with APEX.

Search Images by Images in your APEX application with AI Vector Search

Oracle 23ai has introduced Vector search capabilities from Embedded data on LLM (Large Language Models). ” use cases were presented with LLMs running locally for privacy and data control, allowing to search images from text description and similar images.
This can be run within a Docker image containing following packages:
– ORDS
– Oracle 23ai DB
– Open WebUI
– Ollama (LLM)
– Apache tika (document extraction)
The embedding is managed with some Python code and APEX serves as Interface to the prompt which can be easily defined on a page as Dynamic Action declaratively.

Sponsored Session: Revolutionizing Oracle APEX: United Codes’ Innovative Solutions

“Ideas deserve to be realized” and “visioneering solutions to fit any requirements2 are the 2 mantras of United Codes. The company is mostly known about AOP (APEX Office Print) which is natively supported by APEX. Beyond the success of that tool (more than 15’000 users) they provide much more like:
– APEX Office Edit
– APEX Message Service
– All sorts of APEX Plug-ins (Online PDF editor, Application Search, Drag &Drop, Tooltip, Splitter, as well as all FOEX free plug-ins they took over to support)
– APEX Project Eye
– DB Linter (still in development) for PL/SQL code check
And much more. Feel free to look at the provided links to learn more about those very useful tools.

Single Sign-On: One Login for All Your Needs

Single Sign On is becoming more and more a business request. It provides a single point of authentication.
APEX is supporting different protocols related to this topic, like oAuth2 and OpenID since version 18.1 and SAML since version 21.2. Thanks to the so called “Social Sign-in” and web credentials all kind of identity providers like okta, Keycloak, Oracle IAM, Azure ID are supported by APEX. This will replace the standard login by the one of the identity provider allowing to make use of their additional features like 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) which reduces drastically the hack attempts.
And the future tends to go toward passwordless authentication with tools like fingerprint of face recognition.

Dev Talk: Die Trivadis PL/SQL & SQL Coding Guidelines sind tot – was nun?

For year, Trivadis PL/SQL Guidelines have been seen as a reference for code development. But last version issued in March 2024 is the very last of it, as it no longer will be maintained.
As the need for quality code is more important than ever, there are alternatives to get the code checked against rules:
– SQLcl code scan
– PMD
– SonarQube
– ZPA
– SQLfluff
and a new joiner still in development: dbLinter which promises more flexibility, with more rules based on the Trivadis guidelines with integration into VSCode.
Beside that, SQL based tests are also a requiremtn which can be fullfilled by tools like:
– utPLSQL
– ora*CODECOP
– QUASTO
and also dbLinter. Sounds like a very promising tool.

Tomorrow will be the last day of the conference which I will summarize too.