It had to happen sooner or later, today I had to query an XML type column in Oracle. It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be – but only because I wanted to return a singular attribute.
This is how I did it using Toad:
The early adopter release of apex 4.0 is now available at http://tryapexnow.com/. Just waiting for my access. Expect some bugs and not avaible for IE, but will be a good preview of things to come!
It’s old news, but there’s an APEX Developer competition being run by the OTN here.
The first place prize is really aimed at US developers – throw in an airfare and accomodation and I might be interested.
More interesting is the Application Development Guidelines which presumably is an Oracle internal document being published since I can’t find any other reference on the mighty google. I’ve always followed the created_on/by/updated_on/by and pk/ak guidelines but I’ve generally used sequences and controlled the created_on/updated_on through the application – it’s nice to see an alternative that I will certainly be using in future applications.
What I won’t be using is the “FLEX” columns. One thing I love about APEX is that it brings the application and database together so beautifully. Flexible columns is just a way of saying that we might want to make application changes without making database changes – that’s lazy, not scalable, and definitely not good practice.
