Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 3.0.10 : Going down the rabbit hole!

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) version 3.0.10 was released last week. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes it was the first release to include the Auto PL/SQL feature.

Auto PL/SQL is similar to the AutoREST feature available for tables and views, but it allows you to enable PL/SQL objects for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) over HTTP(S). At this point you might be asking yourself what the difference is between REST and RPC over HTTP and I explain that here. Regardless of whether it is REST or not, it’s a nice convenience feature that I’m sure some people will find useful.

Over the weekend I went full on down the rabbit hole, which resulted in this article.

There are a number of issues with the current release and the docs for it, all of which have been fed back to the relevant parties, but on the whole I think it’s a neat first step.

My preference is still to define conventional ORDS RESTful web services rather than use this feature, but Auto PL/SQL may be just what some others are looking for and it’s always good to have options! 🙂

As far as the 3.0.10 release generally, I upgraded 4 non-prod installations to this release, all actively used for fronting APEX and RESTful web services and nobody has had a problem yet. 🙂

If you are yet to experience the joys of ORDS you can read the articles I’ve written about it here, as well as an introduction to JSON here.

Cheers

Tim…