Joel Kallman Day 2021: Oracle Database Express Edition (XE) 21c

The "Oracle Tech Network Appreciation Day" has been renamed to "Joel Kallman Day" in honor of Joel Kallman, who along with Mike Hichwa was one of the original developers of Oracle Application Express (APEX). Joel suddenly and tragically passed away during the pandemic earlier this year.

Joel at APEX World in Rotterdam, 2019

 

The "Joel Kallman Day" is about appreciating some piece of Oracle tech. In 2016, I wrote about the free Oracle Express Edition (XE) database. It just so happens that the latest Oracle XE version, 21c, was released for Linux a month ago, and for Windows just a few days ago.

Therefore, my blog post for Joel Kallman Day 2021 is about Oracle Express Edition, a great (and free!) way to get started with Oracle, PL/SQL, APEX and databases in general. You can download the software from oracle.com/xe and there's also docs and videos showing how to install and get started.

To give the new version a test drive, I created a Windows Server VM on Microsoft Azure, and then downloaded and installed XE 21c along with APEX and the Thoth Gateway for IIS.

The Azure VM size I selected for this test was "Standard B2s (2 vcpus, 4 GiB memory)". In Azure it costs about USD 40 per month.

Just for fun, here are some timings:

Time to...
... provision new VM in Azure: 5 minutes
... first login to VM: 2 minutes
... download a real browser: 1 minute
... download 21c XE: 30 seconds
... unzip 21c XE: 30 seconds
... install 21c XE: 15 minutes

... download APEX 21.1: 1 minute
... unzip APEX 21.1: 3 minutes
... install APEX 21.1: 8 minutes

... install IIS: 2 minutes
... install Thoth Gateway: 1 minute

... first login in APEX (total time): 39 minutes

Here's a screenshot showing APEX 21.1 in action on Oracle Database XE 21c on Windows Server 2019 with IIS and Thoth Gateway. The page rendering time is not too shabby! :-)

So, a big thanks to Oracle for providing a great, free database, and thanks to Joel and everybody on the APEX team for their excellent work. #letswreckthistogether

Ten years since Mythbusters: Stored Procedures Edition

Today it's exactly ten years since I published my blog post called Mythbusters: Stored Procedures Edition. 

Using "stored procedures" (ie storing and executing code in your database, next to the data, instead of in a middle tier or client) is a practice that is provably both efficient and secure, yet it is often dismissed as "wrong".

My original blog post looks at the usual reasons given against the use of stored procedures for "business logic" (or for anything at all, really) and explains why they tend to be myths (or outright lies), repeated so many times that they are taken as the truth. Take a moment to read the article now.

Publishing the article proved that advocating for the use of stored procedures, which had gone out of fashion already by 2011, was controversial. It caused an immediate spike in my blog traffic, receiving almost 20 000 page views in a single day (at the time, my blog had perhaps a few hundred page views per day on average). The article was picked up by Hacker News and generated a lively discussion there.

So, where are we in 2021, ten years later?

Mainstream development (still) uses imperative, object-oriented 3GL languages (Java, .NET, etc) running in the middle tier or client, dragging data out from the database to process it, with data access usually abstracted through an ORM. Which, predictably, results in suboptimal performance.

The myths about stored procedures are still prevalent. Ask a random Java/.NET developer today, and I bet he will claim that it's impossible to version control stored procedures (myth #1). In that case, please send him a link to that 10-year old article...