Month: April 2019

APEX 19.1 Upgrades : My Experience

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. 🙂

Oracle Help Center of the Future: Reimagining Documentation (COLLABORATE 19)

If you follow me on Twitter you will know I recently had a conference call with the Oracle Documentation folks. We were discussing a number of points, some of which were related to a blog post of mine here.

Following that Roland Mcleod from the team mentioned they would be at Collaborate 19. This is an ideal opportunity for people to give their feedback directly to the team, and help shape the future of the documentation. Please go and speak to them, and give some constructive feedback about the documentation for whatever Oracle products you work with. Let them know what you like, dislike and how things would work better for you! It’s important they understand how you like to consume information, if you want the documentation to improve.

It’s also important that a variety of people get involved. Young, old, experienced and fresh to the game. We all like to consume information in a different way, and it’s important the documentation works for everybody.

I also said I would give their Collaborate 19 sessions a shout out, so here is what Roland sent me.

Can you reimagine Oracle Documentation and Help?

The Oracle Help Center is undergoing a complete redesign. We need all customers, partners and consultants to help us make it work for you.

Please attend one of our sessions and come by to see us at the Oracle Exhibit Area: Oracle Help Center Ambassadors!

Session ID: 112040
Oracle Help Center of the Future: Reimagining Documentation
10:30 AM–11:30 AM Apr 8, 2019
CC 2ND FL 225B

Oracle Help Center of the Future: Reimagining Documentation
3:15 PM–4:15 PM Apr 8, 2019
CC 2ND FL 225B

Session Abstract: In this interactive session; you’ll have an opportunity to provide your feedback about the current and future Oracle Help Center (docs.oracle.com). You will be invited to share how you use documentation in your role and at your organization. This session includes a brief preview of the future Oracle Help Center experience.

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2019 : It’s a wrap for me!

This is going to be a really short post, because the event was really short for me.

It was an early start, which meant a lack of sleep. As usual, this made me feel terrible. I never sleep well, so when something interferes with my already terrible routine I really can’t handle these days. The flight across was fine, and I got to the hotel at the correct time. Unfortunately, I had made a reservation for the wrong month. They had free rooms, so I paid for a room for about twice the price of the original room I booked. I got a shower and sat down to think. I then booked a new flight home for that evening.

I had a couple of DMs from concerned folks who had seen my tweets. Debra came across to chat to me, as she was flying out after lunch, and I had decided I was only turning up for my own session.

My session was a “Multitenant : What’s new in Oracle Database 18c & 12c Release 2” at 15:10. I did the session and went back to my room to wait for my flight home. When the time came, I flew home. Everything was fine.

I’m sure the conference was great, because it always is. Sorry for not being present for most of it.

Cheers

Tim…

The Oracle ACE Program : My 13 Year Anniversary and Website History Lesson

Another year has gone by, and somehow I’m still doing this. 🙂

As I’ve mentioned numerous times, last year was tough year for me. So far this year is going better. That’s partly because I’ve reduced the amount of travelling I’m planning to do, which has freed me to do more fun stuff, like writing and doing the odd video.

As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year.

  • In July I will hit the big five zero.
  • 24 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
  • 19 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or Current name: 31 August 2001)
  • 14 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
  • 13 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
  • A combined 2 years as an Oracle Developer Champion, now renamed to Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador. (21 June 2017)

I thought it would be fun to do a little time travel and look at the website over the years. There were a few really bizarre things I tried out in the early days, including a Gothic horror theme, but I don’t have a record of them and the Way Back Machine only goes back to 2001. You know you are old when the Way Back Machine can’t go that far back! 🙂

So skipping the first year of existence and starting in 2001 the site looked like this.


This was still using the old name before I switched to the current name and URL.

Later in 2001 I started putting the latest articles on the front page and the menu includes link to my Oracle 9i articles. Bleeding edge! 🙂

Things stayed pretty similar looking until 2006, where a new column was added to the front page. I put a rating system in place for the articles, but didn’t know how to stop the search engine spiders from clicking them, so pretty much everything got something like a 2.5 star rating. I quickly removed that and salvaged what little pride I had left.

In 2010 I tried to clean up the look of the site a lot. I removed the left had menu bar and used tabs and quick links instead. I think this was the beginning of the site looking a little more like it does today.

In 2011 I got a bit sick of the washed out colours and increased the contrast. The basic layout is the same though.

Things stayed pretty much the same until 2015, when I switched the site over to use Bootstrap 3. Prior to this I was forever tweaking things for browser compatibility, and having a responsive design was way beyond my meagre web skills. Bootstrap solved loads of problems for me.

The upgrade to Bootstrap 4 a few days ago made some slight changes, but I’m guessing hardly anyone would notice.

This time next year, the site will look … exactly the same. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…