Deep technical writing on Oracle APEX, PL/SQL and AI. Real benchmarks, real failures, and the code that eventually worked.

Three fixes for a lost checkbox, and the first click was never saved

Restoring Interactive Grid checkbox selections in defaultGridViewOptions.pageChange does not work, because APEX applies its own pageChange last. Use a gridpagechange event listener instead, with working code and a diagnostic table.

The full investigation: three fixes for a lost checkbox

Restoring Interactive Grid checkbox selections in defaultGridViewOptions.pageChange does not work, because APEX applies its own pageChange last. Use a gridpagechange event listener instead, with working code and a diagnostic table.

I typed Dutch into the APEX 26.2 search bar

A hands-on test of Interactive Report key phrases and AI search in Oracle APEX 26.2. TL;DR: APEX 26.2 adds key phrases to the Interactive Report search bar. Type "filter status by Completed" and APEX applies the filter itself with no AI model involved. Every

APEX 26.2 can hand users a link to any page, and that is exactly the part to get right

A hands-on test of the new AI-generated navigation in Oracle APEX 26.2, and where the security actually lives. TL;DR: APEX 26.2 lets an AI agent put clickable links to your application's pages right inside its chat answers, and the design is genuinely clever:

Nothing was broken and the rows were still missing

A UAT tester reported that not every selected row got processed. I could not inspect the APEX session in UAT, and SQL Developer cannot see an APEX collection because it is not part of the APEX session. I worked around it with a report region that only shows in debug mode.

Director's cut: the parallel REST project, offcuts

The previous article covers the six mechanisms, what each is for, and how the benchmark corrected itself. This is what got cut from it: the code I removed for length, the debugging that only makes sense verbatim.

Six ways to fire many REST calls at once from Oracle, and how to pick one

Last time I wrote about this I had four mechanisms and a ranking: I saw a Go program fire twenty AI calls at once. Could I do that in PL/SQL?. Now I have six mechanisms and no ranking, because when I put them all on the same measurement basis

I saw a Go program fire twenty AI calls at once. Could I do that in PL/SQL?

PL/SQL has no asynchronous HTTP. Every REST call blocks its session for the whole round trip, so N calls at once means N sessions, and every way of getting more sessions in Oracle is job-based.

It was the standard, so I never read it

I pasted the same Interactive Grid toolbar JavaScript into three applications over three years without ever reading it, because I was told it was the standard and it worked. A colleague who had never touched the block reviewed a story that included the script, pointed out some unused variables.

Six ways to call an LLM from Oracle APEX, and the region choice that broke all six

Oracle and APEX give you at least six distinct mechanisms for calling an LLM, from raw REST calls to fully declarative Shared Components. On my Always Free tenancy every single one failed against OCI's own Generative AI service, including two that involve zero custom code.

I do not ask AI if my idea is good, I ask it why it is bad.

Before building an AI feature, I asked DeepSeek to challenge my idea instead of praising it, using a method I am calling the Kill-This-Idea Prompt. It talked me out of part of the idea and handed me options I had not considered.

We improved the query by 40% and the report was still slow

ORDS is Oracle's tool for exposing database data as REST services. If your ORDS handler builds its JSON response using a PL/SQL loop with JSON_OBJECT_T, replacing it with a single SQL statement using JSON_OBJECT and JSON_ARRAYAGG can make it 3-4x faster.