Oracle Application Express (APEX) 18.2 : Upgrades Complete

 

A few days ago Joel Kallman announced the release of Oracle Application Express (APEX) 18.2.

In a previous post I mentioned the updates to my Vagrant builds to include this version, as well as updates of Tomcat and Java. I’ve subsequently done the updates for APEX 18.2 on Docker too. If you are interested you can see them here.

In addition to this we’ve rolled APEX 18.2 out at work. We already had some installations of APEX 18.1, but many were stuck on version 5.1.4 because of time constraints. Now everything is up to APEX 18.2. We still have a range of database versions (11.2, 12.1, 12.2 and soon to be 18c) at work, and it’s worked fine on all of them.

I spied a couple of people asking about the upgrade process. There’s no difference to previous versions. In the past, if one of the first two numbers change you do a regular install. If it’s not one of those major version changes you download the patch from MOS and apply it. Since this is a major version number change, I installed it in the normal way and everything was fine. I’m not sure how this will work going forward, as I suspect all releases will start to use the new version format, so does that mean every release from now on will be an “install”, not a “patch”? (see update) Someone has probably discussed this already and I missed it. 🙂

I only have one little gripe about the upgrades, which is I have to run an ORDS Validate once it’s complete to make sure ORDS is working fine. It would be really nice if APEX could fix whatever gets broken in ORDS, so I don’t have to do it. It’s just one less step to do… 🙂

Happy upgrading…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The subject of install vs. patch was raised at OpenWorld 2018. I sounds like the current plan is to get rid of patches and take the install approach each time. The APEX team are working on reducing the downtime associated with the upgrades…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

2 thoughts on “Oracle Application Express (APEX) 18.2 : Upgrades Complete”

  1. Matt: It’s not really that big a deal for me. The full install doesn’t take long anyway on a decent server and I’m a fan of Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). 🙂 Even when you try to minimize downtime, there are still a number of things to juggle, including shipping the images and validating the ORDS installation, it easier *for me* to just start it going, while I deal with the other stuff.

    I can understand why some others might be more interested in this, but not me. 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

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