APEX Connect 2016 – short summary

This year’s conference lasted longer than previous editions (3 days). Thanks to this we experienced two whole days dedicated strictly to Oracle APEX, with the extra day treating about subjects related more generally to the database, with main focus on SQL and PL/SQL languages. As stated during APEX Connect 2015, organizers have the ambition to create an event on par with ODTUG Kscope and I think that the move to make it longer, with wider coverage of Oracle topics will definitely help to achieve this goal. The same goes to increasing the number of presentations conducted in English and inviting some of the most known names in the Oracle APEX community like: Juergen Schuster, Patrick Wolf, Martin D’Souza, Shakeeb Rahman, David Peake, Chris Saxon, and of course Mike Hichwa (creator of Oracle APEX). Previous edition has been mostly focused on German-speaking members of the community which by default limited the audience, this time around it was more diverse in both: speakers & attendees.

Our team proudly represented the translate-apex.com project. We were very happy to have the chance to meet in person some of the contributors of translations provided to translate-apex.com – Heli & Marko Helskyaho. As always we enjoyed a meeting with our partners from FOEX.

From all presentations that we have attended here’s the few that we liked the most:

• Andrej Pashchenko – “Pure SQL für Batch Processing – wie weit kann es gehen?” – presentation was about effective handling of large volumes of data and related SQL – PL/SQL context-switching problems;

  

  Pretius Oracle APEX team delegates (Przemysław Staniszewski i Michał Wyszyński) in Translate APEX T-shirts

• Heli Helskyaho – “Managing the changes in database structures in agile project with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler” – Heli showed us how to tackle the database structure versioning problem (and easier diff scripts generation) with built-in tools of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler;
• Koen Lostrie – “5 Lifehacks for the APEX Development environment” – this presentation focused on 5 essential subjects that should be close to hart of any APEX developer who wishes to call her/him-self a professional, e.g.: the use of Logger, authorization schemes, instrumentation for Development /UAT/Production environment and others;
• Matthias Nöll & Daniel Balzer – “APEX bei der Deutschen Bahn: Von Standards und Spezialfällen” – a story on how you build & manage 350 Oracle APEX applications in Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s national railway company);
• Filip van Vooren – “Lernen vom Page Designer: Auf den Spuren von Jules Verne” – in my opinion THE most interesting presentation of the conference during which Filip told us how he “hacked” Oracle APEX. He did it by installing Application Builder as a separate application and by doing this he learned how Oracle built the pages to manage APEX using APEX itself (e.g. Page Designer);
• Alex Nuijten – three (“Structuring an APEX Application”, “Oracle 12c for Developers”, “Analytic Functions: Unleash the SQL Power”) stunning presentations which (as usual) were loaded with lots of interesting information & delivered in a very entertaining manner 🙂
• 2 keynotes opening the PL/SQL and the APEX parts, which were delivered by Chris Saxon and Mike Hichwa respectively – history & future of AskTom and Oracle Application Express.

The most often discussed topic during the whole event was the upcoming Oracle APEX 5.1, usage of Oracle REST Data Services and integration of APEX with latest front-end technologies. All of the presentations are available for download from official APEX Connect 2016 page. An “icing on the cake” for the event was the announcement of the winner of the Oracle APEX Dashboard competition – a competition in which you had to create an APEX based application for visualization of data available from German’s Federal Statistical Office (congrats to the winner – Pavel Gelbov).

To sum it up, we liked the event a lot and we can’t wait for the next edition. From what we have heard APEX Connect 2017 is already being planned and will be held in Munich, Germany and will be organized in a similar manner (1 day of general Oracle Database topics and 2 days dedicated strictly to Oracle APEX).