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I had recently attended OTN Database 12c Developer Day, at Bangalore. I must say it was very informative and gave me new insights on the new database unveiled recently by Oracle Corporation. Rather than focussing more about the event, I will focus what was being the agenda or what what I learned from this event. I must admit I am getting old because this cloud business is too hard to understand. You will agree with me if you see advertisements of cloud-ready, but are not able to understand anything beneath it. This event gave me the initial thoughts. Before 12c, Oracle databases supported multi-tenancy through VPD or FGAC (whatever you prefer to call it). To use this feature, your tables needed to have extra columns to identify a tenant when he is logging in to the database. So with a single database, you could (a big COULD) support multiple clients. But it was used not for this purpose (maybe oracle knew this before). Application developers took this feature to implement ...

This was one of my biggest concerns while using Oracle APEX. I will often enable PDF download from Interactive Report setup in a page, but the download was generating only a corrupt file. My google searches also did not yield any result. Then came the news that I have to install BI Publisher in order to use the feature. This message was floating in OTN forums related to this topic. I got disheartened learning this. Why would Oracle provide such a tool if it can't support PDF download by default. Then came the SOLUTION for the problem. In one of documentation available in Oracle's website I found the news I have been searching for a long time. The APEX download (4.2.2) had been shipped with a war file fop.war. This file is available in the folder  apex_4.2.2\apex\utilities\fop The installation instructions mentioned that I need to deploy this war file in OC4J but which requires  Oracle Containers for J2EE (10.1.3.2 or above) [I don't have a clue what this is]. ...

This mini tip is to help those who does not know CSS much and those who know CSS but do not know where to apply code in Oracle Apex. In Interactive reports by default the control panel items (filters/report titles) etc will be displayed one line below the other. If you have ten filters applied on an IR/Interactive Report then the panel when expanded occupies 10 lines in the report just like the one below: This mini tip will enable you to change this like the one below: If you have a Page 0/Global Page created within your application do not follow step 1. Step 1: Create a Global Page/Page 0 in your application. Step 2: Create a HTML region with template "No template" in this page. Step 3: Add the following CSS inside this region source and save. <style>   table#apexir_CONTROL_PANEL_COMPLETE tr{float:left;padding-right:15px;} </style> This is all you have to do to change Interactive report's control panels visibility option in your entire a...

You must follow the exact steps to add link to attachments in BLOB column in Interactive Report/IR in Oracle APEX: 1. Table must have primary key (I could not make this work with ROWID in View), and it must be queried in the select statement for IR. 2. In query one column must fetch size of attachment. You may use dbms_lob.getlength(blobcolumn) function to fetch the size. 3. In the size column added provide format mast as BLOB and in Apex 4.2.2 "BLOB Column Attributes" section will come. 4. In "BLOB Column Attributes" you must specify at least two columns, BLOB column in "Column" and "Primary Key column 1". If you have composite primary key, you may specify "Primary Key column 2". 5. If you are saving the file name in table, you may also identify the column name in "Filename Column" field. If you are getting " no data found " error in the region of Interactive report, do make sure that the first point mentio...

For educational purposes I had created a sample application. This application is intended to be used within an organization where a table tennis tournament is taking place. The requirements for the application were: There should be provision to create Team and Players (Only doubles tournament was conducted). Team & Players should be entered in Master-Detail format. Matches & Results data should be entered as a tabular format. Match Calendar should be shown. Reports like: Points tally Top 4 teams (who will qualify for semi-finals) The completed application can be downloaded from this link . The E-R diagram for the application (generated out from SQL Developer can be found below). To see more information on generating E-R diagram from SQL developer click here .

This is one of the most coolest feature I like about SQL Developer. I am using version 3.1.07 and this feature is available in this version. SQL Developer requires just the DDL scripts that I use for installation for the product and it generates the E-R diagram within seconds.

Till Apex 4.1 while creating a page you had an option for creating "Page Zero". This page type is a special master page to your application. If you add any element to this page, automatically the element will be displayed in all pages within your application.