OTN Appreciation Day : That wonderful no-cost option - APEX

When I first read Tim's post  for this initiative, I had no idea what to write about, but I am sure none of you expected it to be APEX.

Yes I am a Cloud Apps girl, and for development to extend that (with PaaS4SaaS) I use ADF, and am looking at the non-technical ABCS (made just for me), but I don't discount APEX.

The reason I have chosen APEX as my favourite feature is because people who buy Oracle have found it hard to see value in a product with no associated cost. APEX is a no cost option within the database. That means you don't pay extra, it doesn't mean it is free; it is part of the base bundle.

Nobody says Oracle is cheap (well perhaps Larry did at this yea'r Open World), in fact did you know Oracle spelt backwards in Spanish means:

What this meant was that people decided that if Oracle was not charging extra for it, there could be little value. I used to work for a very large Systems Integrator and when APEX arrived (then called HTML DB) it took me years to persuade our development team to use it for customers. Now some of the best systems are written in APEX. 

#LetsWreckThisTogether

But once the development community realised just what a gem this was, and their product managers started to evangelise , all that changed. 

As ever for some unfathomable reason, that small area of Europe known as the Netherlands have more APEX expertise per capita than anywhere else in the world, and they lead the OTN and ACE community in this area.

So I have chosen APEX as my favourite features, even if I don't use it myself much.

Happy OTN Appreciation Day