Scott Spendolini's Blog

For the upcoming inaugural ORCLAPEX NOVA MeetUp on May 29th , not only will we have Mike Hichwa , Shakeeb Rahman and David Gale from the Reston-based Oracle APEX development team present, but we will also have the entire Columbus, OH based APEX team in attendance, as well: both Joel Kallman and Jason Straub will be in town and have RSVP’ed to the MeetUp! Outside of major conferences such as KScope or OpenWorld, there is no other public forum that will have the same level of APEX expertise from the team that develops the product present!  So what are you waiting for?  Join the rest of us who have already RSVP’ed to this event, as it’s 100% free, and you’re sure to learn a bunch about APEX 5.0 and other exciting happenings in the Database Development world at Oracle. Note: you have to be a member of MeetUp (which is free to join) and RSVP to the event to attend (which is also free), as a list of people needs to be provided to Oracle the day before the event occurs.

Overview Recently, I was working with one of our customers and ran into a rather unique requirement and an uncommon constraint. The customer - Storm Petrel  - has designed a grant management system called Tempest.  This system is designed to aid local municipalities when applying for FEMA grants after a natural disaster occurs.  As one can imagine, there is a lot of old fashioned paperwork when it comes to managing such a thing. Thus, the requirement called for the ability to upload and store scanned documents.  No OCR or anything like that, but rather invoices and receipts so that a paper trail of the work done and associated billing activity can be preserved.  For APEX, this can be achieved without breaking a sweat, as the declarative BLOB feature can easily upload a file and store it in a BLOB column of a table, complete with filename and MIME type. However, the tablespace storage costs from the hosting company for the anticipated volume of documents was considerable.  So much so...

Following in the footsteps of a few others, I’m happy to announce the formation and initial meeting of the ORCLAPEX NOVA (Northern Virginia) group !   As  Dan McGhan  and Doug Gault have mentioned in their blogs, a bunch of us who are regular APEX users are trying to continue to grow the community by providing in-person meetings where we can meet other APEX developers and trade stories, tips and anything else.  Each of the groups is independently run by the local organizers, so the formats and topics will vary from group to group, but the core content will always be focused around Oracle APEX. Groups will also be vendor-neutral, meaning that the core purpose of the group is to provide education and facilitate the sharing of APEX-related ideas, not to market services of products. Right now, there are a number of groups already formed across the world:  ORCLAPEX-MSP  for the Minneapolis, St. Paul area led by  Jorge Rimblas ORCLAPEX-DFW  for the Dallas/Fort Worth area led by  Doug G...