I’m a fan of APEX, but I am not a fan of the shared installation used in Oracle Database 12.1. I’m sure it is great for some people, but not for me. I prefer to have APEX installed locally in the PDB, which prompted this article.
Fast forward to Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2) and APEX is no longer installed by default. It’s still shipped with the software, see $ORACLE_HOME/apex (see update), but not installed. I am conflicted about this…
- On the one hand this is great because I don’t have to worry about removing the shared APEX installation before installing it into the PDB.
- On the other hand this means people have to make an active choice to install APEX, which not everyone will do. That’s a pity. In addition to the tool itself, there is some useful APIs that come with it, like APEX_WEB_SERVICE and APEX_JSON. You don’t really need the later in 12.2 as you have lots of new JSON support, but it’s good to have for backwards compatibility.
So just remember you have an extra job to do after you’ve installed your database, which to install the latest version of APEX. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Update: As per comment from Joel Kallman, always download the latest version and install in the PDB locally, not in the root!
Hi Tim,
Thanks for sharing this. To augment what you said, you should:
1) Install the latest version of APEX, which may *not* always be in $ORACLE_HOME/apex. Download link is at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/downloads/index.html
2) When installing APEX, install it *locally* into your PDB and do not install APEX common in CDB$ROOT.
Joel
Joel: I put a reference to your comment into the main body of the post, just in case people don’t scroll down that far! 🙂
Cheers
Tim…