Feed aggregator

I of course attract a highly clever readership :). As some have commented, for a single table to require 1000+ consistent gets to retrieve 1000 rows implies that each row needs to be accessed from a different block. This in turn implies the Clustering Factor for this index to be relatively bad and the associated […]

I have a query that runs pretty darn efficiently, here’s the setup: So the query basically returns 1000 rows based on the CODE column and it does so using an index on CODE. The CBO has got the costings for this just about spot on. For 1000 rows returned, it does so with just 1006 […]

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS !! After many months of nervous waiting, knowing that my chances were extremely slim at best, I have just received my confirmation letter from NASA saying that I’ve been one of the lucky ones selected to participate in the “Journey To Mars” program !! I’m soooo damn excited !!! Planning is now […]

If you have 6 or more people in you organisation who would be interested in attending a seminar, please contact me at richard@richardfooteconsulting.com. I currently run my highly acclaimed “Oracle Indexing Internals and Best Practices” seminar as public events, which has now been run in some 18 countries. I’m also at work on developing an […]

I’m very excited to announce some European June 2018 dates for my popular “Oracle Indexing Internals and Best Practices” seminar. This is a must attend seminar of benefit to not only DBAs, but also to Developers, Solution Architects and anyone else interested in designing, developing or maintaining high performance Oracle-based applications. It’s a fun, but […]

I’m very excited to have a couple of papers accepted at this year’s ODTUG Kscope18 Conference in sunny and likely very hot Orlando, Florida between 10-14 June 2018. I’m excited because I’ve been to a few of these conferences before and they have always been excellent events. As a mainly Oracle Database kinda guy, it’s […]

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In every Oracle APEX application we create, we add a feedback mechanism. We're not only doing this during the development phase, but we also leave it enabled in production.

We want to give the users the ability to give feedback to the team in a structured way. It should not be an hassle to give feedback, one click for the user where he can say what it's going; if he likes it, if something can be improved, if there's a bug... but at the same time we want as much info as possible at the time the user enters this feedback. What app are they in, which page are they on, what session information was there...

Most of the users really like to be heard and the feedback mechanism in our apps helped us a lot to engage with our customers.

Here're my top 3 ways of providing such feedback mechanism in an Oracle APEX app:

Feedback link and Team Development (pre APEX 18.1)

This method I started to use with Oracle APEX 4.2 and beyond. I blogged about using this feature here and here before.

In APEX you can create a new page; called the Feedback page. It will not only create a page, but also a navigation bar entry. Some screenshots of the wizard:


Which will result in:


I prefere to use the Modal dialog option as it feels more integrated in the app. This page is a normal APEX page, so you can further customise. For example you can make the Application and Page fields hidden.

The feedback that is entered is stored in Team Development - an area in APEX where you can do your project management.



Feedback feature in Blueprint and the new APEX 18.1 app creation wizard

In Oracle APEX 18.1 the application wizard got an overhaul and is now inline with the blueprint feature which was enabled previously on apex.oracle.com.


Enabling feedback is a matter of ticking a checkbox... and the result looks awesome to me :)


The user can share his feeling by selecting a smily, enter some feedback and include an attachment. When you use APEX 18.1, you will see the nice floating label (label inside box) for the feedback text item. Also when you submit feedback you get a nicer message that the feedback was submitted, instead that the dialog will automatically disappear as with the standard feedback page in 5.1 and earlier.

In Blueprint on apex.oracle.com and in APEX 5.2 EA1 (which became now APEX 18.1 EA2) the feedback was stored in its own table, but since APEX 18.1 EA2 the feedback is stored again in Team Development. In the Administration section there are a couple of screens that query the apex_team_feedback view. It looks like many of the Blueprint features that were showcased before, became native APEX features (e.g. email framework, feedback).


When clicking on User Feedback and the pencil you see the details for every entry.


You can enter a response which will update Team Development by using the APEX API  apex_util.reply_to_feedback.

What I find interesting is that APEX 18.1 made a change in their pages; it catalogs the pages now as Component or Feature. A feature contains more than just a page, so the Feedback page became the Feedback feature and will create more pages than just the feedback page itself. Just like if you click the box with Blueprint, it can add the administration section and navigation bar entry.


The feedback mechanism we knew in APEX 5.1 and before, got a nice update in Oracle APEX 18.1, it might be worth doing an upgrade once 18.1 hits production.
One nice addition would be the ability to add a screenshot and annotate the screen like Martin and I build a long time ago. It would save the user creating a screenshot and uploading the file.

Feedback with REST API

If you are using another issue or ticketing system it might be worthwhile to gather the feedback there. You can still create the feedback page, but add some additional processes (or replace the team development process) so the feedback is stored in your favourite tracking system like Bugzilla, Jira, Redmine and others. In the next section I'll show how to integrate with two issue tracking systems we use.

Oracle Developer Cloud Issues

In the projects where we use Oracle Exadata Express, we use Oracle Developer Cloud service, which you get with your Exadata Express account to manage our project.


The nice thing is that you have a Git repo and Issues all available and all the other things around to mange and streamline your project. In the feedback page I added a call to a PL/SQL procedure, so an issue is created whenever feedback is given.

The PL/SQL package I wrote to create an Oracle Developer Cloud issue:

Bitbucket Git Issues

When we started in 2015 with the development of APEX Office Print, we used Team Development in Oracle APEX to manage the development and for version control we used Bitbucket (Git repo). We use different technologies like PL/SQL, APEX, Node.js, Markdown, CSS and HTML. A bit later we decided to use the issues in Git for our node.js code as it made it easier to track an issue/feature and a certain commit (we enter the issue number when we commit).


Bitbucket has also some nice features to integrate Trello boards and Bitbucket cards.

At one stage I wanted to add all our Team Development features as Bitbucket issues, so I wrote a small script that calls the REST API and creates the issues for you:

Nothing stops you to add a process on your Feedback page in Oracle APEX to create a Bitbucket issue automatically. If you copy everything inside the for loop, you are golden.

I hope this post helps you to get user feedback... and don't hesitate to put in the comments what you do to engage with your users.

I’ve had a couple of recent discussions around clustering and how if you attempt to improve the clustering of a table based on a column, you thereby ruin the current clustering that might exist for a different column. The common wisdom being you can only order the data one way and if you change the […]

I’m very excited and privileged to be asked to present the opening and closing sessions at this year’s Trivadis Performance Training Days in Zurich, Switzerland on 19-20 September 2018. It’s one of the premier Oracle training events in Europe, one which I’ve always wanted to attend. This year has a fantastic lineup, so I’m really […]

Just a short note to say I’ve started a new blog that we focus on the one and only David Bowie: https://davidbowiewordpresscom.wordpress.com/ Those of you that only vaguely know me, know I’m a huge David Bowie fan, so I thought it might be a bit of fun to write about his extraordinary body of work. I’m […]

One of the potentially cool new features introduced in Oracle Database 18c is the Memoptimized RowStore, designed to improve the performance and scalability of key-value based queries. A new pool in the SGA called the Memoptimize Pool can be configured to store specific heap tables that you may wish to optimize, in a manner not […]

Although the recently released Oracle 18c Database is really just 12.2.0.2 under the covers, there are a few little features and enhancements that are of interest from an indexing perspective. These include: Memory Optimized Rowstore Scalable Sequences Oracle Text indexing enhancements, such as automatic background index maintenance and new optimize index options JSON Search Index […]

I’m currently determining which European countries to initially target for a series of my 2 day Oracle Indexing Internals and Best Practices seminars tentatively scheduled for the late May / early June time frame. The cost for the 2 day seminar is to be confirmed but will be approximately 1200 Euros (plus any local taxes), […]

While answering a recent question on a LinkedIn forum, it got me thinking whether there’s a potential use case for using an INDEX SKIP SCAN I hadn’t previously considered. I’ve discussed Index Skip Scans previously (as I did here), a feature introduced around Oracle9i that allows an index to be considered by the CBO even […]

I’m very pleased to announce I’ve now finalised some dates in New Zealand for my popular and highly acclaimed “Oracle Indexing Internals and Best Practices” seminar. They are: Wellington 12-13 March 2018: Tickets and Registration Link Auckland 15-16 March 2018: Tickets and Registration Link As usual, numbers will be strictly limited due to the small class nature […]

I blogged about Quick SQL already a few times as I saw not many developers knew about it.

In Oracle APEX 5.1 you can install Quick SQL by going to the Packaged Apps section and install it from there:



I really love Quick SQL as it allows me to build my data model very fast, but also shows me the structure of the tables in a very efficient way. That is why I created a script that can reverse engineer existing tables into the Quick SQL format.
From Oracle APEX 5.2 onwards you won't find Quick SQL in the packaged app section anymore... but no worries, it's not gone, it's now built-in the APEX framework itself :)
Go to SQL Workshop - SQL Scripts:

Hit the Quick SQL button:


Here you have Quick SQL :)


You can run your script after you save, straight from this interface.
Note: the screenshots are taken from Oracle APEX 5.2 Early Adopter, so things might change in the final release of APEX 5.2.