Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to attend (much though I would love to), but my thoughts will certainly be with his other friends and family during the difficult time and I’ll certainly be raising a glass to Carl on the day.

I’m not going to post a link to the news article directly, as it contains some distressing details that some people might not wish to read, however the news has been confirmed by various Blogs and (reliable) people on Twitter.

For those who didn’t know him, Carl was “Mr AJAX & Javscript” in the Application Express World, he was responsible for some incredibly cool features in the APEX tool and was always helpful with the APEX community.

However more than that, Carl was a really cool and great guy. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Carl at many of the Oracle events in the last few years and would often send him “hey dude, what’s up with my javascript here?” messages on MSN in the small hours and he would always answer them, without fail.

Carl was definitely a good friend, I’ll miss him a lot and I’ll never have another whiskey without checking for flies first!

One of my fondest memories about Carl (and I have a lot) was the day he took Dimitri and me for a guided tour around San Francisco and showed us sights that we never would have seen otherwise.

My thoughts are with Carl’s family and friends at this difficult time.

At ODTUG2009, for the first time there will be a seperate APEX Track (anyone doubting the future/success/growth of APEX should hopefully see how positive this is). All of the APEX sessions will hopefully be held in the same room (or couple of rooms), which means less chance of APEX presentations overlapping, or having to race around and find the locations of the rooms each time (or is that just my problem?).

The ODTUG board have asked myself, Dimitri Gielis, Scott Spendolini and Patrick Wolf to be responsible for the APEX Track content at ODTUG09.

So how can you help? Well there are a couple of ways -

• Make your Mark - You can shape the direction of the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference by discussing and voting on topics in our new online Kaleidoscope Community. Tell us what you know you need to learn. You have ideas and we want to hear them!
• Submit an Abstract - Don’t wait until the last minute (abstract deadline is November 3), submit your abstract now. Not sure what to present? Begin participating in the Kaleidoscope Community and find out which topics are important to developers today.

I started working on the book way back and it seems barely a week has gone by since when I haven’t been asked the question (quite rightly!) “when is the book coming out?”.

This is the first technical book (or any book for that matter) that I have written, so the whole thing was very much a learning experience for me, although obviously I like to think I know about the content side of it, the logistics of writing the chapters, the review process, the amount of time it consumes was all very new.

When I agreed to write it, I contacted a few people who have already published Oracle technical books just to get some opinions on what I’d just agreed to. The comments all had a very similar theme of “Prepare to put your social life on hold because writing a book takes a lot longer than you imagine”.

I really did enjoy writing the book, but I totally agree with how much time it can take, there is nothing quite looking at a blank screen for an hour, or spending three hours reworking a single page and ending up with what you had original, or the joy of laying out at example only to find that you want to completely change it and have to start again from scratch.

Now, those who know me know I’m not a very ego-driven person, however, I have to say that it did raise goose-bumps actually seeing the book selling on Amazon.

Even weirder was seeing where the book was positioned in Amazon’s sales figures.

Fleetingly, the book was in the top 1000 books being sold on Amazon and was the number #1 seller in the Databases section (and the Oracle section). Of course the cynic in me would say that’s partly due to all the back-orders being satisfied from it being late, but it’s still nice to see that people are actually buying it.

I certainly don’t expect to please everyone with the book, since I was limited in terms of pages what I could write, I already went way over the original 400 page estimate (to over 700 pages) and could have easily carried on for another 500 pages or so. Also the way I’ve structured the book is to cover a different area of development in each chapter, things that are typical to encounter when designing production applications in Application Express, so there are certainly topics that I don’t talk about since I needed to talk about other areas in much more detail.

I certainly expect a lot of emails along the lines of “Why doesn’t it contain XYZ?”. Well the answer to that is that it is not intended to be a complete guide of everything you can do in Apex, more an in-depth guide on certain key areas.

So that’s that one done…is it time to start thinking about another one? Hmm maybe after a short “rest” ;)

It was my first time in the Netherlands and I loved it, I have to say I thought it was a bit of myth about everyone using bicycles until I saw more bicycles in 20 minutes than I’ve seen in 30*cough* years in the UK.

The event was fully subscribed (infact slightly more) with 34 attendees, some of whom had been on one of our previous events (which is a really encouraging sign and a good endorsement that you’re doing something right!).

In the 3 days, we covered a lot of different topics, trying to squeeze in as much as possible to try and give everyone something that they could take away with them (always a difficult task!), hopefully we managed to do that (the feedback comments were very good and positive).

I’m pleased to say that not a single demo failed this time…until we got to the quiz section on the final day, then all the problems came home to roost at the same time, luckily it was pretty funny (with me barely able to speak for laughing at some points).

On the last training events we have invited the attendees out to a restaurant as a ‘thank-you’ from us, however this time we decided to go Bowling instead. All I can say is it’s been a loooooong time since I’ve been bowling, our lane was decidedly wonky and the balls weren’t perfectly spherical…there, did I make enough excuses?

All in all, I had a great time, can’t wait till the next one!

However, one thing that a few people have focused on (pardon the pun) is that the update has changed the way that viewed threads are displayed in a very light grey colour, making them a bit hard to read, as shown in this screenshot.

One option is obviously to petition the folks at OTN to try and get the look and feel changed (personally I don’t find the grey colour too bad, but I can see how it could be a problem to some people). However, obviously the OTN folks are never going to be able to please everyone at the same time.

Fortunately there is a way to change the look and feel yourself, not only of the OTN site, but of any website. Now I’m not going to get into ‘Browser Wars’ here, but if you use Firefox it is pretty simple, since you can use tools like Stylish and Greasemonkey to custom sites. If you use IE then there are other plugins around you can use.

I use Stylish (actually I use Stylish *and* Greasemonkey but that’s another story) and once you have installed the plugin you can create new styles for any website you visit. For example if I create a new style for the OTN forums like this:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://forums.oracle.com) {
a:visited {
color:#00007F !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}
}

Then the next time I visit the OTN Forum (actually immediately if you have stylish already enabled) then the visited links should be in a darker blue colour, like this:

Now I’m not saying this colour scheme is any nicer (in fact I think it’s a bit harder to read, but it does show how you can easily style any website yourself if you don’t like the design.

If you modify the layout, feel free to let me know and perhaps we can start a collection of OTN Forum skins?

Many people have had problems getting their Apex applications indexed by Google and other search engines. One of the reasons for this was that Google (and other search engines) would often index the page using a different session id each time, since Google (and others…ok, let’s just say Google from here on in?) does not ‘understand’ the format of Apex style URL’s and would therefore consider each URL unique.

In short, you could end up with the same page in your application indexed multiple times, with a different session id in each and therefore Google would not treat it as the same page.

The Apex team introduced the idea of Session 0, specifically for the purpose of being able to provide a link without having to specify a valid session id (or rather 0 is considered a valid session id, however when the user requires a ‘real’ session id then one is generated at that point).

So instead of links being indexed like this -

http://foo.com/pls/apex/f?p=101:1:7678676125675

The link can be -

http://foo.com/pls/apex/f?p=101:1:0

Where the 0 represents the session id, so all the links in Google would reference the same URL.

So, that’s all great isn’t it? Well…almost…unfortunately there was a problem with using Session 0, and it was to do with redirects.

First, let’s look at what happens when a user (or really a browser) requested a page using session 0 in Apex 3.1.1 and earlier (note that in the following code I’ve removed certain identifying things like IP addresses etc).

[jes@MBP ~]$ GET -d -e "http://dbvm/pls/apex/f?p=101:1:0"
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:00:26 GMT
Location: f?p=101:1:0
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:00:26 GMT
Client-Peer: 192.168.0.100
Client-Response-Num: 1
Client-Warning: Redirect loop detected (max_redirect = 7)
Set-Cookie: WWV_PUBLIC_SESSION_101=1074339690918688

Here I am using the GET command from the libwww-perl toolkit to simulate a browser request for the page. The parameters I use tell the command to only show me the HTTP Response details (the -e parameter) and that I’m not interested in seeing the actual response (the -d parameter).

The key thing here is the ‘Redirect loop detected’ message, this is the GET command telling you that it has found a redirect back to the same URI. The message is a little misleading since it sort of implies an infinite loop (which you’d think would make your browser hang). However if we simulate the same URL request using plain old telnet, you’ll see the real response:

[jes@MBP ~]$ telnet dbvm 80
Trying 192.168.0.100…
Connected to 192.168.0.100…
Escape character is ‘^]’
GET /pls/apex/f?p=101:1:0 HTTP/1.1
HOST: foo.com
<p>HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:00:56 GMT
Location: f?p=101:1:0
Set-Cookie: WWV_PUBLIC_SESSION_101=507304029881630
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close

The line with “Location: f?p=101:1:0″ is the killer line here, as it tells the browser to redirect back to the same page (using a relative link rather than an absolute one), however also notice that a cookie is being set.

So the sequence of events is:

1. Browser requests a page using session 0.
2. Server responds with a redirect location and a cookie
3. Browser requests the redirect location

So, essentially whenever a browser requested a URL using session 0 your webserver would actually be hit at least twice. For a small website this might not be a problem, however for a large site with lots of users who bookmarked a link to the home page with a Session 0 link, or people who used a link from another site etc, this could potentially add a big overhead to the number of requests your webserver had to handle (whilst the redirect response is not a large amount of content to server, it is still nonetheless a web request that needs to be handled).

This was also a potential problem for search engines, since many search engines do not always handle redirects nicely, since they may assume that when they try to access (and index) a page that if you’re sending them somewhere else with a redirect that something is ‘not quite right’. It’s certainly a factor in getting Google to nicely index Apex applications.

So, let’s take a look at how it works after patching to 3.1.2, running the same request for the same session 0 URL we get:

[jes@MBP ~]$ GET -d -e "http://dbvm/pls/apex/f?p=101:1:0"
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:02:01 GMT
Content-Length: 13352
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Client-Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:02:01 GMT
Client-Peer: 192.168.0.100
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: WWV_PUBLIC_SESSION_101=8141285575191180

Notice how this time there is no redirect at all, the content is returned directly (note the Content-Length response header) and the cookie is automatically set.

If you’ve never had first hand experience of the problems the previous Session 0 behaviour could cause, then this might not look that interesting, however the fact it is now patched has huge consequences for most Apex applications out there, in two key areas:

• Your webserver will now not need to handle all those additional redirect requests, meaning the the webserver is freed up to support even more ‘real’ end user requests.
• Search engines can now more easily index Apex applications, without you having to do a single thing (well besides installing the patch).

In short, by applying this patch you have taken another step forward in making your Apex infrastructure much more scalable and I also expect to start seeing many more Apex applications ranked higher in Google (and other search engines….had to say it, sorry).

I’ll hopefully post some more on the other implications in some of the patches if I get a chance…

You can find more details about the patch here.

There looks like quite a few fixed bugs (it’s always hard to say that without it sounding like a bad thing!) in this release, definitely worth the upgrade!

There are lots of Apex sessions going on at OOW this year, it seems to increase every year (in the 3 years I’ve been going to OOW). Rather than repeat the list here, David Peake has created a nice little Apex app (what else?!) to show the details of all the Apex sessions, including the number of seats and registered people, you can also find Davids original post about the sessions here.

My schedule for presenting this year is:

• Sunday 21st Sept (10:00 - 11:30) - Oracle Application Express SIG: Ask the Experts
• Sunday 21st Sept (15:45 - 16:45) - Oracle Application Express Hints, Tips, and Best Practices
• Sunday 21st Sept (16:50 - 17:30) - Oracle APEX: Power to the People (Customer Success Story with Rich Mutell of AMGEN)
• Thursday 25th Sept (09:00 - 10:00) - Dispelling Myths About Oracle Application Express

I seem to have a habit of getting ‘not so great’ time slots at OOW for some reason and this year seems to be no different. There’s a chance on the Sunday that the ‘Power to the People’ session will overlap with the ‘Hints, Tips and Best Practices’ one. Fortunately for the ‘Power to the People’ one it is Rich who talks through it all, I just sit there and press the buttons and move the mouse, so I’m sure Rich can handle that himself.

Both Joel Kallman and myself are presenting during the Customer Success Stories sessions, which tough luck as the Customer Success Stories are always popular sessions, however hopefully I’ll see a few friendly (perhaps lost?) people in my session.

The Best Practices presentation I’m doing is the same one I did at the Collaborate and ODTUG events this year, so if you’ve already seen it then that’s one more session you can chalk off your list!

The new presentation that I’m doing this year for OOW is the “Dispelling Myths About Oracle Application Express” presentation on thursday. Once again this has to perhaps be one of the worst times possible to presentation, think about it…9am the morning after the big party…there’s going to be lots of sleepy eyelids in that session, tough crowd! I’m looking forward to doing this session and have a few ideas on how to make it a little bit different and fun, but then again the things that work in your mind sometimes don’t work out in-front of an audience so we will have to see how brave I’m feeling!

This seminar is being organized by Oracle University and you can enroll here.

The next few weeks and months are extremely hectic, but I’m really looking forward to this seminar.

Hope to see you there!

For example, looking at the Apex Evangelists homepage in Safari -

Or perhaps you want to send a snapshot of a Google Maps location to a friend via email:

So now you can take a screenshot of just about anything on your iPhone, tap on the photo and email it to someone else (or use it as a Wallpaper etc)….very very cool.

So how do you take a snapshot? Simple…just quickly press the Home button and the Power button simultaneously and the screen should flash white for a second or so to show it has taken a snapshot. You should then find the snapshot in your Photos application.

I noticed it has *just* been released:

It’s a quick easy process to install the new firmware onto the phone (I do get the impression that most people who hate iTunes simply haven’t tried using it long enough, it is one of those application that is just ‘done right’ to me).

It took around 25 minutes in total to download and upgrade the firmware followed by a synch to restore all my old contacts etc, which gives this (very little changed other than the App Store icon) screen:

Now it’s time to go and check out the App Store and download some goodies for it!

Hmm, I guess that really makes me a geek huh? I get to look at the iPhone apps and the first one I look for is an Oracle related one.

Of course, being an Application Express fan, I’ve been used to using an Oracle related product for a long time on the iPhone (since it’s just a web app).

If you travel often enough, then sometimes you’re going to have bad journeys and I guess this was my turn for a bad-one.

When I checked in at the airport, the woman at the check-in desk just didn’t give me that ‘warm fluffy feeling’ that she knew what she was doing. You know how some people inspire confidence and
others don’t? She was definitely in the “don’t” category. In fact as I waited for my flight, I checked my emails and tagged this line to the end of an email I sent to Dimitri:

“I have a funny feeling my luggage is going to go missing for some reason”

My journey down to Heathrow (my first flight of three), was probably one of the most turbulent I’ve ever had. To make things worse, the planes were being stacked up at Heathrow, so we had to keep circling until it was our turn to land. This meant we had to circle through the same (or at least it seemed the same) bit of turbulence 4 times. By the 2nd or 3rd time around this, there started the unmistakable sound of people being sick all round the plane. Even though I don’t really get travel sick myself, I was starting to feel a bit ‘green’ at this point too.

Once I got to Heathrow, I only had 40 minutes until my connecting flight to Dallas. I always plan to do a little work on the flight between the UK and the US, because it helps to pass the time. However about 10 minutes into the flight (literally just after taking off), the person in-front of me put her seat right back into the “I’m practically sleeping on your lap” mode. Now as much as I like my Macbook Pro, it still has to obey the Space-Time Continuum laws and it was impossible to even open the screen with her seat all the way back. Luckily the flight wasn’t full so I moved over to the seat next to me (which was empty obviously), and as soon as I did that her boyfriend (who I was then sitting behind) decided to put his seat fully back (I’m 99% sure he waited for me to move before doing it).

Anyway, I decided enough was enough, and did something so shocking he wasn’t expecting it…I actually tapped him on the shoulder and said “Excuse me, your seat is too far back and I can’t work, can you move it forward?”. That’s right, all notions of ‘being British and not causing a fuss’ went out the window and the guy actually was so shocked I’d done it, he did actually move his seat far enough forward so I could work.

So, great, I could now pass the time by doing some work. It’s a good thing too, as there were so many crying babies on the flight (I stopped counting at 6) that the chances of sleeping were next to nil (for me anyway, the couple in front of me had no such problems apparently).

Anyway, once I landed at Dallas I went straight tot he baggage reclaim bit (well, after the obligatory customs clearance) and just as I was walking into the baggage claiming area. I heard the words that no traveller (especially after a long flight over the atlantic) wants to hear…I heard my voice being called over the announcement system and was told to make myself known to help desk. Well, it turned out that the words “I have a funny feeling my luggage is going to go missing for some reason” came back to haunt me, as indeed they had lost my luggage (I really wish I’d emailed Dimitri and said “I have a funny feeling I’m going to win the lottery this weekend” instead).

So, there I am in Dallas Fort Worth airport, with no case and I think to myself (since nobody else there would have cared!) “I’ll go and stock up on some provisions”, well I can honestly say if you’re ever in the situation were you have had your luggage lost and need to buy a toothbrush, razor, spare t-shirt etc, you’d better hope you’re not in Dallas FW airport, as there wasn’t a single shop that I could buy anything like those in (come on…is there really no market for selling toothbrushes in an airport shop?!?!).

Oh, and connecting flight between Dallas FW and New Orleans wasn’t great either. They changed the departure gate twice, which meant racing between gate A and B and then from B to C (even though there’s a shuttle, there’s still a lot of running involved, not exactly what I needed at that point).

So, once I got to New Orleans airport I had to fill out a claim form for my luggage (again they didn’t inspire me with confidence, so perhaps I’m not holding out much hope of seeing it again). I jumped into the nearest cab and all I can say is that I have never been driven so fast in such busy traffic before, I glanced at the speedometer at one point and we were doing 120MPH. Just when I thought things weren’t going too badly, the tax driver made the classic mistake of setting off at a traffic light when the traffic light hadn’t even changed, causing him to bump into the car infront (luckily at more like 1MPH than 120MPH), still it meant sitting in the back of the cab for 10 minutes while they shouted at each other (I made sure the meter was turned off for that bit, so at least the entertainment was free).

I checked into the Hotel, which was the first trouble-free experience of the day, a special thanks to the girl on reception who managed to rustle up a nice ‘mini travel-kit’ for me, so I do now at least have a hotel-sponsored toothbrush, razor etc.

I gave Dimitri a call (it was about 10PM friday evening by now) and we went out for a walk to Bourbon Street for a look round, some food and a very well earned (or at least well justified) drink.

It’s my first time in New Orleans, but I’m loving it so far, Bourbon Street is a crazy place, I’ve been to lots of crazy places, but something about Bourbon Street just seems even crazier than most.

Oh and for those travelling out to New Orleans for the conference and wondering what the weathers like? It’s hot with a capital H…it is HOT. When I landed it was about 85 degrees (when I landed in Dallas it was 97 degrees apparently). So you can pack light…just not as light as me!

So, anyone know a good tailor in New Orleans? The thought of having to race out and buy a new suit, shirt, tie, shoes etc for my first presentation on monday isn’t really that appealing right now!

You can download the patch from Metalink, Joel Kallman has blogged with more details on the patch number (7032837).

So, what are these training days? Well, we host a lot of on-site training for clients, however we also hold ‘open training’ days, where anyone can sign up, come along and get training by people who know the product inside-out. We believe that our training provides the highest quality training for superb value for money.

The current agenda (subject to change) covers a variety of topics, but it doesn’t just stop there. We don’t believe in just a 9-5 training schedule and one of our core beliefs with these training events is to provide an open format where you can also raise any other (APEX related!) problems/questions you might have, particularly during some of our ‘out of hours’ relaxed sessions.

Following the previous training, we expect interest to be high (and places are strictly limited, so please don’t delay to register).

You can find more information on exact location, pricing and signing up at http://eurotraining.apex-evangelists.com

You can register for the webinar here, but here’s a snippet from the Hotsos site:

Application Express (ApEx) is a highly flexible and highly scalable Rapid Application Development environment for web applications. But what do you do when your application’s success starts to become its downfall? This free, one-hour presentation will cover strategies and tactical advice for monitoring and addressing performance issues, and presents some of the best practices for making ApEx Performance Problems easy to diagnose. This webinar is presented by Doug Gault, head of Hotsos Product Development.

If you’re currently using APEX, you won’t want to miss this.

Here at APEX Evangelists, we have been busy toiling away for the last few months and we’re pleased to announce that we have finally managed to port APEX to run on Microsoft SQLServer and MySQL.

Now you can use the full power of Application Express regardless of which backend database you’re using.

We have issued a couple of press releases about the product, which we are calling “Application Espresso”. Product Manager for Espresso, Dimitri Gielis was heard to say “It’s AWESOME”, whilst John Scott was quoted by Time Magazine as saying “It’s a major step forward for Database Independence, whilst maintaining a synergistic paradigm shift for adaptive conceptualization of Web 3.0″.

We are currently looking for Beta testers, so drop us a mail if you’re interested.

The course was a 3-day Advanced class covering many different topics related to APEX, from Best Practices, through the APEX Dictionary through to APEX 3.1 New Features (and beyond).

The attendees had a variety of backgrounds and were using APEX in many different ways and it was really interesting to discuss what they had (and had not) been able to do in APEX. Obviously the things they had not been able to do we took as a challenge to try and show them how they could do it!

We always try to make our training events nice and informal, so that the attendees always know they can ask us questions to either clarify something that we discussed in a presentation, or even just ask us a pop-question if they bump into us in the elevator first thing in the morning (it happened and I ended up missing my floor because I was engrossed in the problem!).

One thing we keep noticing about people who use APEX is that they’re so passionate about the technology and eager to learn new ways to use it. The challenge for us was to show them things they weren’t aware of, or to solve some of the problems they had.

We also try to keep the training interesting (always helps!) and interactive, so we always make time for questions, include dedicated open Q&A time (which from the feedback was greatly appreciated, as an example Dimitri sat and demonstrated how to solve a problem that someone had been trying to solve for a while in their own system).

We also held an APEX Quiz which went down very well (although it helped that we had some nice prizes to give out for the top 3 people!).

On wednesday evening we took the attendees out to a great little Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge called Sale e Pepe, the staff there were absolutely crazy, particularly the manager, but the food was amazing and it gave everyone a great chance to ‘bond’ even more. The only drawback to this of course was that I was the first to present on thursday morning (Dimitri managed to schedule that on the Agenda without me spotting it!).

Some particular highlights for me:

• One attendee told me it was the best course he’d ever been on (thanks Roger!), of course I then had to check it wasn’t the first course he’d been on! It is always amazing to hear feedback like that. Particularly when it comes from someone who is already using APEX on a daily basis.
• An attendee from the first training we held came back for the second one. That type of ‘vote of confidence’ really does help us to know we’re doing something useful!
• We managed to ‘re-unite’ a couple of attendees who hadn’t seen each other for close to 20 years, they looked at each other on the first morning at the Welcome Break and recognised each other (perhaps we should rename ourselves ‘APEX Friends Reunited?).
• Attendees asking us almost as soon as the course had ended, when the next one would be held…now that’s keen!

I really enjoyed last week and it’s particularly nice to see that the attendees are not only staying in touch with us after the training, but they’re also staying in touch with each other…the APEX community is indeed a friendly one!

It’s been a hectic week, I got the train back from London on friday afternoon (a public holiday here in the UK, which was fun…let’s just say that the UK does not manage to make public transport run on public holidays very well).

I have about 30 hours at home, before getting ready to fly out on Easter Sunday (another bad day to travel!) to do some more APEX Training, time to check those demos work again!

Once again, thank you to all who attended, it was a pleasure to meet you all.

We will be announcing the locations and dates of our next training sessions very shortly.

Now, I am quite risk averse when it comes to updating software, especially when I’m going to be demoing or training in the near future. However when APEX 3.1 became available a week ago (on the friday evening), I knew I had to download it and play around with it. I’d previously tried it out on the Beta evaluation provided by Oracle, however it’s still not the same as having it on your own machines.

My test upgrades went smoothly, but I also had a dilemma, did I dare risk using 3.1 for a training session I was doing on the monday (giving me just 48 hours or so to test it all worked nicely).

Well call me stupid or call me brave, but I decided that the risks were outweighed by the rewards and I decided to upgrade my ‘presentation’ instance to 3.1 (after taking a backup of course!).

Roll forward to monday and the start of the 3-day training session, it was my first time to demo (in the wild, so to speak) the new 3.1 features to an audience. Bear in mind this was beginner level training to people who hadn’t even used APEX before, so as far as they were concerned *all* the features were new.

However, I needn’t have worried, APEX 3.1 was extremely stable and the new features in 3.1 (particularly interactive reports and the declarative blob support) went down extremely well with the attendees.

Once again, by the middle of the 3-day course a couple of the attendees had downloaded XE and one person was trying to upgrade their XE to use APEX 3.1 (they ran into a few problems but I helped to sort those out).

By the way, I put ‘First APEX 3.1 Training’ with a trailing question mark, since as far as I’m aware this was probably the first training course which 3.1 has been used on (outside of some of the demos done by the Oracle team themselves of course!).

So, I can rest easy that nothing could possibly go wrong during my next training session in London (hint of sarcasm there, since to assume nothing will go wrong when you’re planning to do that many live demos would be plain self-delusion!).