With the exception of one application, which is taking a little longer to test, we’ve upgraded all our APEX installations to APEX 19.1.
I thought it would be good to share my experience of this, in case anyone is a little on the cautious side. 🙂
The vast majority of upgrades went fine. We just did the standard upgrade (install), without trying to minimise the downtime at all.
I should spend some time playing with the method for reducing downtime, but it’s hard to justify when the downtime is already short and acceptable. 🙂
One group of databases did prove problematic. It has done for previous upgrades also. The upgrades failed and I had to uninstall APEX, do a little bit of cleanup (dropping users), install it again, recreate the workspaces and redeploy the applications. It was a pain in the ass, but not difficult or time consuming. I have no idea why they failed, but as I said, it’s not the first time that has happened for this group of instances. If I had more time to play with it I’m sure I could find out, but as I know a reinstall fixes it, and time is an issue, you know what I’m going to do. Just run the scripts and move on…
As far as the applications themselves, there were no dramas. We try to keep things simple and most things are pretty vanilla, so it’s not like we are pushing any boundaries, which will expose anything. 🙂
I’ve seen some people have had problems with APEX 19.1 when it’s fronted by Apache and Nginx reverse proxies. We’ve got a mix of ORDS on Tomcat, and some things still using mod_plsql (don’t judge me 🙂 ) on OHS. This is all fronted by F5 Big IP load balancers as the reverse proxy, and we’ve not had any of those issues. 🙂
So all in all, pretty easy and what I was expecting.
Cheers
Tim…
PS. As always, I feel the need to point out we are a relatively small user of APEX, but it’s growing. Having said that, it’s installed on almost all of our Oracle databases. Added to that, I’m really aggressive about APEX upgrades, and will be even more so when the last of our systems move over to ORDS. Others may want to exercise a little more caution than me. 🙂
