Thursday, November 8, 2007

The Bigger the Better

I'm often asked for examples of "large" Oracle APEX installations.

A friend of mine (Mr. B) is working with a large customer who asked that question of me again ... so I thought I would use this blog to ask YOU for further examples and also relay my answer to these sorts of queries.

What I want is examples of applications with a large number of concurrent users and/or a large number of pages. The more detailed information the better.

{Our policy is to not publicly use any company or organization names unless we have authorization to do so. Further to that, I am always interested in getting new references but that is entirely up to you, so please indicate if you would be interested}

If you prefer you can email me directly rather than replying to this blog.


As for my response to "Is APEX popular and can it scale to support large numbers of users?":

As a starting point they can look at the APEX OTN Page and then Community and Partners where you can see the large number of Consulting companies, Hosting companies, Internet Applications, even Commercial Applications. There is also close to 30 different people blogging about APEX. Some of these sites have very large user bases (Metalink, Think, Ask Tom, etc.)
Oracle has several very large internal sites running Oracle Application Express including sites such as ARIA People Search (also available as a Packaged Application) and sites for tracking customers, etc.

A review of some of our internal lists, on who is using Oracle APEX, reads like a who's who of the Fortune 1000 and also includes numerous government agencies and public institutions. The popularity amongst Universities around the world is growing rapidly as they have discovered what a great tool Oracle APEX is for teaching Web design, SQL, and database fundamentals.

We also have some large customers in the process of migrating commercial Oracle Forms applications to APEX (Some with 1,000's of Forms).

The APEX OTN Forum is the third most popular Forum on OTN behind SQL & PL/SQL, and General Database (http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=18)

Our Packaged Applications are downloaded an average of 3,000 / month.

The free hosted instance on http://apex.oracle.com receives an average of 1.4 to 1.5 million page views a week and now hosts over 12,000 Workspaces.

The number of sessions at Oracle Openworld is growing annually (see earlier blog) which all goes to show how popular APEX has become [15 Sessions, Hands-On-Lab, 2 DemoGround booths, etc.]

To highlight the importance of APEX within Oracle - with 11g APEX is now included in the seed database. Therefore, whenever 11g is installed so is APEX, it is no longer on the Companion CD.

I could go on but you get the idea ... What I really need is some customer details on those big applications I know are out there. Personally I am sick of hearing (from ill informed people) what Oracle APEX supposedly can't do - I want more ammunition on what it DOES do.

So please get back to me with details on those Oracle APEX applications and the Bigger the Better.

Regards,
David

4 comments:

oraclenerd said...

David,

I keep trying to get it used at my company...we do use it, a little, for the Datawarehouse (one-off apps), but I keep pushing for more. We just implemented our fancy new web 2.0 external facing app in Ruby and I tell them I could have done it in half the time (if that...). Keep up the good work. Awesome product!

chet

Earl Lewis said...

David,

I've been "evangelizing" Apex for a number of years where I work and it's being very well received. We keep finding more and more ways to use it, so thank you for the great product.

While I was reading your post about the apex.oracle.com hosted site I was wondering what kind of hardware is behind that site. Do you have any idea? And could you share that with us? I haven't seen anything published by Oracle that would help with sizing an Apex implementation based on expected volumes and thought this would be a great opportunity to do that.

Earl

Earl Lewis said...

Ooops! Just found your other posting on sizing of apex.oracle.com. Thanks.

Petko said...

David hi,

My company will migrate our flagship SaaS product to APEX, which is ideal for this purpose. This thing is huge, really.

APEX is so great, that sometimes I am wondering what is the catch.

Will keep you posted on all developments.

Cheers,
Petko Karamotchev
Sofia, Bulgaria