When working with APEX, you also need a number of tools to improve the efficiency of your work. It isn’t enough to just have the APEX IDE at your disposal. Besides the APEX IDE for the application development, you may use a bunch of other tools. This is what I mean by the APEX ECO-System.

For the PL/SQL development and creation of the objects, such as tables, views, synonyms, sequences, … you may use SQL Developer. The DML scripts with the code for creating those objects may be generated by SQL Datamodeler. This tool is used to design the data model, which offers a graphical representation of the relationships between tables and offers the possibility to generate database objects automatically on our database. Both tools are part of the Oracle Database Development tools, just like APEX.

Once the objects are modeled and generated on the database, you can start with the development of the application in APEX. After some time, when a first version of the application is ready, it can be deployed on a test environment. Without the aid of an external tool, it’s necessary to make a script of each package, trigger, sequence, synonym, table, view… in order to create them on the test environment. And when you start with change requests and enhancements, it becomes even more complex!

After the end-user has tested the application and given his feedback, you normally will have to change your packages, tables,… or you will have to add some new functionalities, or you’ll have to change the existing ones. Without the aid of an external tool, you’ll have to make a script of each change you make, in order to deploy the changes on test as well. This is very time consuming and the risk of making mistakes is very big.

In the past, in my personal experience, it took me lots of hours to make a script for each column definition, table, relationship, package, trigger, view,… which has changed during the development cycle. It was very annoying and especially when you forgot one… It’s very time-consuming to find differences between the development and test environment.

I explain how Red Gate’s Oracle tools solve these problems in the full post on the iAdvise blog.