I was on top of the recent ORDS 22.1 release, but somehow I managed to miss the APEX 22.1 release. Here’s an update on what’s been going on with my builds…
Vagrant Builds
A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 22.1. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change. The ORDS update was done 11 days ago. It was a bigger update, as the installation process for ORDS 22.1 has changed quite a bit. I wrote about that here.
You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.
Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use ORDS 22.1 and APEX 22.1 images now.
APEX is also included in the database builds. You can find them here.
I was a little slow to add the updates to the Docker builds. The Tomcat and SQLcl changes were done a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only added the Java, ORDS and APEX changes today. I held back a little on the ORDS 22.1 changes, as I was rewriting a bunch of articles that were affected by the installation and configuration changes.
You can read my Docker/Container articles here.
Real Life
We probably won’t be putting APEX 22.1 live until the next patching cycle, which will be July. In the past I could be quite aggressive about the upgrades, but as APEX is becoming more important in the organisation, the rollout of updates has to be a bit more considered. 🙂
The same will probably be true for the ORDS 22.1 rollout. We run ORDS in containers, so it’s really quick and easy to replace all the infrastructure, but I wanted to be a bit cautious because of all the changes in the new version. Having played with it a bit now, I’m feeling a lot more confident, but at the time we were starting our patching cycle I was too nervous to include it.
As far as home systems are concerned, I only use the latest and greatest, unless there is a compelling reason not to. 😉
Cheers
Tim…
Hi Tim,
thanks a lot for all the helpful articles. Currently I am trying to build a playground for the most recent XE, APEX and ORDS based on some of your vagrant builds. Unfortunately I am stuck with a strange connect error. I use the service name of the PDB but keep getting connected to the CDB:
sqlplus sys/SysPassword1 as sysdba@localhost.localdomain/XEPDB1
SQL> show con_name
CON_NAME
——————————
CDB$ROOT
I tested this on ol7_21_xe resulting in the same issue. Any workaround that I can use to install ORDS would be appreciated.
Oliver: You are not using the correct syntax. It should be:
username/password@service as sysdba
sys/SysPassword1@//localhost:1521/pdb1 as sysdba
You have put the “as sysdba” before the service and missed out the port.
Cheers
Tim…
Merci! I have put the “as sysdba” in the wrong position by accident. In the right spot I always got “ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied”. For me this is strange as I created the db like this:
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe-21c configure <<EOF
${SYS_PASSWORD}
${SYS_PASSWORD}
EOF
and connected like that:
sqlplus sys/${SYS_PASSWORD}@//localhost:1521/xepdb1 as sysdba
It seems on my system the XE setup did not use the supplied password. The connection only worked after setting the password via "alter user identified by".
Cheers
Oliver