To honour this year's #JoelKallmanDay, I'd like to use this as an opportunity to speak about mental health, rather than get technical like I have done in the past. Yes, my blog posts have been particularly lean - this is my first post since the same event in 2021 - I completely missed last year. Not just this special event, but from any posts whatsoever. It's not that I've moved away from Oracle, nor that I'm short on inspiration - I'm still emailing myself ideas on a regular basis, but I haven't been setting time aside to transform them into something to post. And I haven't been totally  ..read more

Now I feel extremely luck to live in a part of the world that has been relatively free of impact from COVID-19, certainly from a societal health perspective. That said, I'm fairly certain there has been an indirect impact on my non-billable APEX activities - one only needs to look at my blog history over the past few years. Blogging is an outlet I've always enjoyed, and I miss doing regularly. 'Next week' I'll start doing it more regularly. Next week... Blog frequency dips But I was flicking through some tweets and saw Tim's announcement regarding #JoelKallmanDay, an initiative ..read more

 It's lockdown on a long weekend, and Oracle APEX 21.1 has just been deployed to apex.oracle.com, how could I not have a play? We've been provided a link to New Features, but for some aspects I'll need some help from the documentation, when it becomes available - and perhaps some examples from people more knowledgable than I. Native Map This will be one of those features where I'll need some more guidance, and I suspect this AskTom Office Hours session that I haven't watched yet would probably be a good start. The create page wizard looks promising Create native map And after fi ..read more

As a data engineer (of sorts) I've handled some cool data in my times, and created some interesting plots. I still remember when I used rpad with stddev() in SQL*Plus to prove the data we had formed a bell curve. More recently I've used Oracle APEX activity logs to identify bottlenecks and high frequency pages. But this evening I was in awe as I saw a simple plot appear on my smartphone. This plot used data that spent at least 15 minutes travelling almost twice the distance from the Earth to the Sun to reach us, across an incredible network of computers. Data from a craft that made history as ..read more

Ahem. select apex_string.format(q'[It's been %s days since my last confession]' ,trunc(Sysdate) - date '2020-04-14') "G'day World" from dual G'day World-----------It's been 282 days since my last confession It's been so long, the Blogger UI has changed. I don't think I like it. Maybe another thing to consider adjusting in the new year... It's also been four years since my last blog review, and I promised this one may be a doozy. 2020 was something else, right? I spent a good portion being thankful that I  kept my job could work from home live in such a remote ..read more

From an e-mail I sent to colleagues, I thought I should also share it here (revised): I'm known as the office optimist. And I do literally have many things to be grateful for. I still have a job, I’m able to work from home, and I have a decent study setup. And I’m an experienced introvert, this shelter-in-place business is no problem for me. I feel like one of the last people who’d go stir-crazy. But recently I felt I had a crappy week. Worst in some time, and nothing really to do with current events. A vital piece of software kept flaking out on me, and I felt I didn’t achieve what I was ai ..read more

The world has obviously lost a number of in-person conferences in recent times, but luckily we have people like Martin who asked the APEX community to jump, and they responded "how high?" And out comes 24 hours of 24 speakers with APEX @ Home, on April 16th 2020. A lot of regular speakers appear to have pulled out some awesome sessions, and then there's my dinky one on APEX logic suggestions. It's an AskTOM Office Hours session, so it's also recorded for later viewing, but you'll miss the chance for live Q&A. And you'll also miss the challenge Connor put out there - to get a virt ..read more

In my previous post about tweaking APEX classic reports, most of the settings were "low-code" configurations. All except the final line of JavaScript that moved the radio group from its default location, to the region's title bar where we'd normally find buttons. But how did I conjure that statement? When I wrote my book on jQuery in APEX, my general premise was each web page can be queried like a database can, you've just got to learn how to apply the filters to find the relevant component. Browser Tools In most browsers, if you right-click on any component on the page, then choose 'Inspe ..read more

I like classic reports in Oracle APEX. They're so versatile, and while it may not look it in this example, adjusting particular declarative settings can make a real difference in a small region displaying pivotal data. And this still looks like a report. You should see what else they can do. Left region is default settings, right region has a few options set Base BehaviourThe classic report is straight out of the wizard, this example performs a cross join to inflate the data set. select e.* from emp e cross join emp e2 where :P29_DEPT is null or e.deptno = :P29_DEPT A where clause has been ..read more

We can finally add 'native' to the list of choices when it comes to 'prettified' URLs, as Oracle APEX 20.1 honours the statement of direction with a simple checkbox in application properties. APEX 20.1 Application Properties - Friendly URLs I tried this with old & new applications, and it appears to be case insensitive. https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/sage/r/SCOTT_UT/Zhuzh?P29_DEPT=10 APEX also appears to honour either format, regardless of the setting. https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/sage/r/swesley_forum_ut/emp?p6_empno=7566&p6_mode=R It contains the workspace name, application ..read more