Snippets and Thoughts of One Oracle Developer

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APEX locks in 26.2, #JoelKallmanDay

A A deploy pipeline imports your APEX app while the rest of the team keeps working in the Builder. Until APEX 26.2 there was no supported way to lock the application from code, so most of us flipped the build status to Run Only and hoped for the best. APEX 26.2 ships a real lock API. I upgraded a clone of a local APEX 26.1 database and tested what it actually does, next to everything else APEX calls a lock. It is #JoelKallmanDay today, the day the Oracle community publishes in memory of Joel Kallman, who led the APEX team for many years and it is missed by many. Here is my contribution. Four things that look like a lock Application lock – the Builder lock on the whole app. Only the developer who locked it can edit or unlock it ( docs ). Visible in apex_applications. Page locks – one developer per page, Builder only, no public API. Visible in apex_application_locked_pages. Build status – Run Only keeps developers out of the Builder. Not a lock, but the only thin...

Working copies in 26.2: test one page, never overwrite the app

Y You want to change one page and test it before anybody else sees it. With APEXlang on 26.1 you have two options and both are not great. Import into the real app, and you overwrite it (everybody's work in it, not just your page). Or import into a plain copy under another id, and you get an app that has no idea where it came from: you can't easily compare it with the original, and half of your business logic breaks because the app id changed. The old loop Currently, I test every page in a plain copy of the app, one per job. It works, but look at what it costs: the copy is a whole-app import, and so is the delivery into the real app afterwards the copy has no link to the original, so "what did I change?" is a git diff, never something APEX can answer the copy has its own application id, so everything keyed by the app id (settings, roles, translations, logs) misses we need a freshness check before the real import, so we don't revert somebody else...

APEXlang in a team: deploying the whole app without losing somebody's work

G Generating APEXlang is the easy part. The challenge is the day after, when four people share one DEV instance. APEXlang imports the whole application by id. There is no partial import in 26.1, so deploying your one changed page means deploying the whole application, including whatever your colleague did not finish this morning. That is the problem this article is about, and it is workable today with plain git and a few rules. None of it is tied to a specific tool. I built it into ADT , but you can script every step with SQLcl, git and a bit of shell. The export is your commit Export the application as APEXlang and commit it. Two details matter later. First, record the application checksum at export time, next to the files. That is the number you compare before every import. Second, keep one shared branch that always holds what DEV looks like right now. Every deploy updates it and every task branch starts from it. That branch is what turns "somebody was faster than you...

The APEX 26.1 Interactive Grid now works like a spreadsheet

E Every release I scan the APEX Ideas App implementations to see which long-standing requests finally landed. In 26.1 three of them are about the Interactive Grid, and together they add up to one thing: the editable grid now behaves much more like a spreadsheet. If you build data-entry screens, this is the upgrade you actually feel. So let me walk through what changed and where the sharp edges are. Copy, cut, paste, paste-insert The editable Interactive Grid now supports the full clipboard set you expect from a spreadsheet: Copy – puts the selected cells on the clipboard Cut – copies, then clears the cells Paste – overwrites the target cells with what is on the clipboard Paste Insert – creates new rows and drops the clipboard data into them It works within one grid, between two different grids on the page, and from an external spreadsheet. Multi-row and multi-column selections all come along. Copy was already there before, but this release rounds out the rest, so a ...

How I forced Claude to finish the job

I I do a lot of work with Oracle APEX, and since April I run it out of a single folder. It is an Obsidian vault, a git repository and a Claude Code project at the same time. I call it my Brain, and Claude Code is the operator working inside it. This article is not about prompts. It is about the less visible part: contracts, checklists, git discipline, hooks and a feedback loop, because that is what turned Claude from a clever intern into something I can hand a task to and walk away from. Almost every piece below was born from a mistake it made. This is the simplified version. Every section below has more behind it than I can show here, and whole areas of the Brain (the parts that read my inbox, draft invoices, scrape LinkedIn or run my weekly audits) are left out on purpose. If you know Hermes Agent from Nous Research, the self-improving agent with its own skills and memory, this is kind of my version of it. Built from Markdown, git and hooks instead of a framework, and tuned...

Free Oracle certifications to collect this summer

S Summer is slow. Clients go quiet, the inbox calms down, and you finally get a few evenings that are actually yours. That is the perfect window to grab a couple of free Oracle certifications before everyone comes back in September. Here is the deal, and it is a good one. The courses are free, the certifications are free, and each exam gives you 15 attempts. The exams are not proctored, so you sit them from home whenever it suits you, listen to your music, drink whatever you want. With a free course behind you and 15 tries in your pocket, it is basically impossible to fail. Miss something on the first go, see what you got wrong, and take it again. The topics are worth your time this year too. Most of these paths sit around AI on the Oracle database and OCI, which is where a lot of the interesting work is heading. So you are not just farming badges, you are picking up things you will actually use on real projects. And even the architect exam is for free! I would prefer a job...

Mapping APEX page navigation with ADT.ai flow

M Maintaining a large APEX application means living with one nagging question: if I change this page, what else am I about to break? Before you touch page 50 you want to know what links into it. Before you delete page 50 you want to be sure nothing still points at it. How do I even get to page 50? APEX does not make that easy. Navigation is spread across branches, buttons, lists, navigation bar, breadcrumbs, report column links... There is no single screen that says "here is everything that links into page 50" or "here is everywhere you can go from page 50". So you end up grepping the export or clicking through the builder page by page. I built a small command into ADT.ai that answers exactly those two questions. It is called "flow", and once it has scraped an app it answers offline, in milliseconds. What it does It reads the navigation links of requested application(s) from the database once, stores them in a local SQLite file, and the...

Letting AI safely explore your schema with ADT.ai Discovery

H Here is the situation I kept running into. I want an AI agent to help me with a real schema, look up a table, count some rows, sanity-check a column, find which view a column comes from. None of that is risky on paper, it is just SELECT. But the moment you hand a database connection to an agent, you are one bad prompt away from a disaster. TRUNCATE CASCADE, DROP PURGE, even simple UPDATE can do a lot of damage. So I built a small command into ADT.ai for exactly this case. It is called "discovery", and the whole point is that an AI (or any muggle) can poke around a schema without being able to break anything. What it does You give it a SELECT and an environment, it runs the query, prints the result, and writes a Markdown report. That is it. No DML, no DDL, no PL/SQL, no multi-statement smuggling. If you try anything other than a single SELECT, the validator rejects the statement before it ever reaches the database. adtai discovery -env DEV -sql "SELECT t...

Rewriting APEX Deployment Tool with Codex and Claude

I I have been shipping APEX Deployment Tool for a few years now. It is a Python CLI that extracts Oracle database objects, APEX applications, and data exports into files you can version in Git, then via clever patch files deploys them anywhere. Other people also use it, which is great. The problem is I am not a professional Python developer, and after a couple of years of adding features on top of features, the code shows it. So a two weeks ago I started a full rewrite. Not just a refactor, but a full rewrite, done almost entirely by AI, module by module. This post is about why, how, and what is still ahead. Why the rewrite The code quality problem was the most obvious one. The largest files had grown into multi-responsibility monsters that were hard to read and harder to change safely. Normalizers (the functions that clean up DDL before writing files) were woven into the main export script instead of living in their own testable place. Adding a new object type or tweakin...

Life in Weeks skill

I I read Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" piece years ago, the one where he draws every week of a long life as a single grid of small squares. The image stuck with me for a reason I could not explain at the time. I rebuilt it as a tiny Claude Code skill that lives in my Obsidian vault and refreshes itself. Let me start with why the idea matters, then the skill, then how to build your own. The power of seeing your weeks A life of 90 years is about 4,680 weeks. Written as a number it means nothing; you read it, you nod, you move on. Drawn as a grid where each week is one square, it stops you cold. The whole thing fits on a single screen. That is the trick, and it is not a gimmick. The reason it works is the unit. A year is too big to feel and a day is too small to matter, but a week is the exact size of a human plan. You already think in weeks. You know what one feels like. So when you see all of them laid out and notice how few are left, the abstraction of ...

APEX 26.1 Docker images for your local setup

A APEX 26.1 dropped and everyone wants to spin it up locally. Good news, you don't have to build anything from scratch. The community have already done the heavy lifting. Here is whats out there. uc-local-apex-dev (United Codes) GitHub: https://github.com/United-Codes/uc-local-apex-dev This is my first recommendation for anyone who just wants to get going. Philipp Hartenfeller from United Codes maintains it actively, and it is kept up with every release since 23ai. Runs Oracle DB 26ai + APEX 26.1 + ORDS 26.1 out of the box. A single "./install.sh" handles everything, including waiting for the database to come up and configuring ORDS. Works with both Docker and Podman (it auto-detects your engine), and it is Mac/Linux friendly. ORDS Docker Compose (Anders Swanson, Oracle) GitHub: https://github.com/anders-swanson/oracle-database-code-samples/blob/main/ords-docker-compose/ Anders Swanson works on Oracle AI Database at Oracle, and he published ...

Describe tables to your AI with APEX_DB_DICTIONARY

A APEX 26.1 shipped a small package called APEX_DB_DICTIONARY , and at first glance you might ignore it. We already have DBMS_METADATA for pulling object definitions, right? Well, these two solve different problems, and once I saw the difference I started reaching for the new one a lot. Here is the short version. DBMS_METADATA gives you DDL meant to recreate an object. APEX_DB_DICTIONARY gives you a description meant to be read, by a human or by an LLM. Noisy old way Say you want to hand the structure of EMP to your AI, so it can write you some queries. The reflex is GET_DDL. SELECT DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL('TABLE', 'EMP') FROM dual; And what you get back is a wall of storage clauses, tablespace names, segment attributes and other junk you don't care about. To make it readable you have to do a lof of transformations first. BEGIN DBMS_METADATA.SET_TRANSFORM_PARAM(DBMS_METADATA.SESSION_TRANSFORM, 'STORAGE', FALSE); DBMS_METADATA...

I built a Devil's Advocates skill

W When you decide alone, your strongest critic is missing. Friends are busy or too polite, and the AI you ask just agrees with whatever you already lean toward, or the push back is very soft. So the brain settles into "this feels right" the moment you have half-committed to a direction. That is how I end up shipping things I should have killed and killing things I should have shipped. So I built a Claude Code skill that provides this honest feedback. It is called Devil's Advocates . You bring it a real decision and before it argues with you, it ask you few claryfing questions. One of them always forces you to say out loud what could go wrong, what you would lose if this call is the wrong one. Half the time that round alone is the value, because most bad decisions are just badly framed ones. A vague question gets you vague answer. Once the question is sharp, it dispatches five adversarial sub-agents in parallel. Parallel matters: each one answers without seeing th...

APEXlang is here

A APEX 26.1 ships tomorrow. After 2 years of massive team effort, we have Oracle APEX Special Update office hours scheduled for Thursday May 14th, 16:00 CEST, and the marquee feature is finally coming out of the oven. Six new icons! The feature is APEXlang , an open application specification language, and it's the biggest change to APEX since its introduction in 2004. APEXlang in one paragraph APEXlang is a new export/import format for APEX apps. Instead of a single ".sql" script with environment-specific numeric IDs, you get a zipped package of ".apx" files (one per page, one per shared component, one at app level) plus native ".sql", ".css", ".png", ".js" files living at proper paths. It is something like ".yaml" files, but on steroids and editable. Human readable, diffable, mergeable, Git-friendly. Same IDs across environments (static and non-numeric). The classic SQL script export isn't goin...