[Music] hello and welcome we are thrilled to announce Oracle Apex 24.1 today Apex founder Mike hitcha will show you how Oracle is leveraging AI to make it even easier for you to develop Rich applications then you'll hear from Apex customer Sai natarajan from cineos health for a glimpse into how Apex can be used to solve real business problems and finally we'll tune in for a conversation with oracle's Executive Vice President of database server Technologies Andy Mendelson now before we get started make sure you use the comments to tell us which capability you're most excited about in this release or to ask any questions you may have we'll do our best to respond to as many of you as we possibly can now let's get started take it away Mike well welcome today we're here to talk about Oracle Apex the philosophy of Apex is to build applications with a low code mindset You're Building applications that are declarative you're assembling components sophisticated components components like fasted search interactive reports forms workflow these components have been hardened over time they've been refined and they've been used by millions of people every single day building applications by assembling these components is empowering you as a developer can solve business problems more rapidly with greater Fidelity and over time when it comes time to upgrade you just upgrade Apex and all the components get better this leads me to why we're here today today we're here to release Apex 24.1 it is available right now with Apex 24.1 we're introducing ai ai is transforming the way we're building application you can get everything you want out of Apex but you can get it easier and faster and with a code assistant there to help you out but don't take my word for it let's take a look in Oracle Apex we start with a data model describing the information our app will manage then to let users find visualize and modify that data we create pages and Page designer in every page to configure what data each region should display or edit we use the declarative SQL language developers have loved for 50 years for example on a revenue overview page while defining a chart we can just type in the SQL if we know it but the Apex assistant offers a productive new approach using natural language to show the sum of the amount due for patient procedures in the preceding 24 months Group by month we just literally type those words Apex assistant generates the SQL statement and are charts working immediately on another page showing recent medical procedures to let end users report on a list of patient names procedure descriptions total amount and Doctor names for patient procedures in the past 60 days with the most recent ones first we just type in that thought apex's assistant knows how our tables are related so it generates the SQL with joins to get the job done we roll out our report in record time while working on our app we can ask Apex assistant for help on any questions or doubts we have about SQL like what's the difference between a join and a left outer join like having a personal SQL coach and Mentor it explains the answer with concrete examples to help us learn Apex assistant is also available in SQL Workshop so we can use it to iteratively refine our queries we start with a simple select showing patient names and just tell it what else we want the query to retrieve add count of medical procedures done by each patient it updates the query and we run to see the new results add the cost of each patient's most expensive medical procedure in the last year and only show the patients with at least one procedure showing the most expensive ones first this is really an amazing new way to be productive at building data Centric apps if we write a query that encounters an error we ask Apex assistant to explain the error and help us fix it each interaction is a chance to learn as Apex assistant helps us understand what went wrong and and what to do instead as Apex developers using these same SQL skills we can work with every kind of data imaginable and no matter our skill level the AI powered Apex assistant helps us write SQL learn SQL debug SQL as well as write code using PL SQL but that's not all while it can help us with any query we write it can also Kickstart our whole application creation process in Oracle Apex we can create an app with generative AI we just explain the purpose of our solution in natural language including the kinds of pages we want and any particular features we'd like the app to have and the Apex assistant proposes a set of pages and options that meet our needs it's a conversation so we can add additional options we think of like Access Control list based security and the ability for users to leave feedback if we think of additional Pages required we just ask we can request a faceted search page and a dashboard we forgot to mention earlier here when done click create application to see an overview of the app to be created and click create app again to finish it gives us a great head start for adding additional features that only we know how to do the new Apex assistant is ready to turbocharge all of our Enterprise app development that was pretty cool right I build applications every day and in these applications I use SQL and to be honest remembering the table names and the column names is it's not something I particularly enjoy and being able to leverage AI to create these SQL statements to inject complicated things like analytics it just is great you have an assistant and it just allows you to focus on what's most important which is solving the business problem and creating a cool app that users like in addition to our AI capabilities Oracle Apex is introducing improvements to working copy working copy enables teams of developers to collaborate more effectively and see exactly what each other are doing let's take a look Leo and CES are teammates working on different features for a Human Resources app in Oracle Apex each one creates a working copy named after the ticket number they've been assigned to implement their new feature in isolation Leo is working on ticket 14 to add a commission field to the employee Pages he knows not to make changes in the main app and this red banner helps keep him honest Leo switches to his hr14 working copy and sees the commission field he's already added he makes the last required change to relabel the remuneration tab to pay and saves at any time Leo can compare the current page with Maine to review all the changes he's made if he switches to another department page in page designer he notices a warning icon and clicks on it he can see that his teammate sesily is actively working on this page in in her working copy and can review the changes she's made to it he can see she's added a new location field to the page Leo's done implementing his feature now so he starts the merge into main the change components look correct and he could review the diffs again if needed he proceeds with the merge and chooses to delete the working copy one done now when he runs he sees his new feature is now part of the main application well that was a big Improvement especially when collaborating with other developers now let's get some perspective on these new features for that I'd like to welcome Apex customer say natarajan from SOS Health welcome say can you start out by telling us about yourself and how you use Oracle Apex most recently we have been implementing many many systems at cineos that are significant Enterprise scale systems with very large development team that's cool it's great to see that you're building Enterprise Apex apps at scale we've briefed you on some of the Apex 24.1 capabilities and I'm curious what your first thoughts are yeah since we've been doing generative AI the hard way I'm really excited for Native Genera generative AI support along with the vector database you know we are already deeply integrating this transformative test into our apps and this release just makes it so much easier the second thing in ji that is really exciting is the Apex assistant right our data models are getting more and more complex and in order to make the tables friendly for generative AI we are making longer table names longer column names and we are switching to feature store tables which are like really long 80 columns 90 column tables and it is getting really hard to write SQL statement because to get that without a typo I really look forward to Apex assistant it'll make me more productive yeah I couldn't agree more and I have the same perspective I know you have a lot of data Centric apps and I know these apps are built on large complex data sets can you comment on the ease of use of building out Solutions using Apex I'm actually going to slightly take it in a different direction Mike ease of use on development is important but even more important is ease of use of the application itself for the end user and the Apex applications we have rolled out generally people say oh my goodness that's so simple right and why is it so simple because there is a well-defined framework that you tend to follow in developing these applications that it becomes very very predictable for people to navigate people to use and stuff like that so yes the development is is very easy because you have the page region item architecture it breaks down your business problem the other piece is this there are a lot of other platforms when you make one tiny change the whole thing breaks apart it doesn't compile anymore or it doesn't do anything that doesn't happen with Apex you can break a page but the rest of the stuff keeps running those are really really critical stuff that most Apex people just take for granted that doesn't exist in many other platforms that's for interesting and I completely agree with you an apex being a model driven execution engine doesn't suffer from the fragility that other code generated Solutions do I know you're a skilled developer and your organization can and does develop apps in different Frameworks I'm curious when and why you choose Oracle Apex to solution your apps yeah so it it's really simple Apex lets me focus on the actual business problem at hand not on the technology right that allows somebody like me to bring value showcase something to my leaders very very quickly thanks a and thanks so much for joining us today thank you very much for having me Mike I am looking forward to the next release and Beyond okay stay with us up next we have a special guest to talk about oracal database in more detail [Music] with me today to talk about the Oracle database I have Andy Mendelson you may know Andy is the leader of the database development or but what you may not know is that Andy started his career as a c developer developing SQL layer and database internals and today we're here to talk about database 23 AI so Andy from a developer perspective what new features do we have in database 23 AI thanks Mike um 23 AI is probably the most important new database release we've done in in years and years um we have the usual hundreds of features for operating databases for doing powerful analytics against the data um but with this release we made special focus on features for that would be attractive for developers and the first thing of course we want to talk about is is AI you know everybody's excited about Ai and in 23 AI we have sort of the namesake feature AI Vector search which lets our SQL users anybody who can run a little write a SQL statement can now very easily do similarity search against unstructured data like photos um doc text documents Etc and just to show this thing off let's do a demo of how this technolog is integrated inside Apex you might be familiar with fuzzy Tech search now let's explore how AI Vector search can add semantic search to an Apex app significantly enhancing the user experience this social media app features a search bar at the top it's configured to search through these image descriptions for example if I search for Mumbai all the images with Mumbai in the description pop right up but here is where it gets interesting what if I enter Bombay since this application is powered by a vector search it also fetches images from Mumbai because it understands that Mumbai and Bombay are the same city Vector distance shows how relevant each image description is to your search term so how did we build this magic using onic lapex let's break it down for you first we start by loading the Onyx embedding model into the database AAL database 23 AI can run deep learning embedding models natively ins inside the database we can then use this Onyx model to convert the image descriptions into vectors and store them in the database now when user asks a question we first convert the user's search term into a vector and then we calculate the vector distance to compare both these vectors based on this Vector distance we sought the distance and that is why when we type UAE all the images having Dubai are descriptions schematically closer to UAE show up at the top with a database 23 AI there is no need for external llms or additional resources outside the database everything from Vector embeddings to storing and calculating Vector distances is handled natively within the database this makes it easy to integrate Advanced semantic search features into your Apex application that was pretty cool we saw how using basic SQL you're able to take advantage of something that advanced as Vector search so what other features do we have in database 23i for developers so one of the really cool things we've done in 23 aai is we've unified the worlds of relational databases and Json document stores and into a a feature we called Json relational Duality views and so basically you get the best of both worlds you get all the advantages of classic relational database schemas high integrity and consistency and transaction throughput and all that cool stuff but then on top of that you can build views and these views are adjacent documents so for the developers who just want to build apps using Json documents and they don't want to know about the complexity of the the SQL relational schema they can just do that now you can build these views the developers can just say get that view for me get the Json document into their app do their updates put it back into the database and under the covers we take care of updating all the underlying relational data for them that's great and and Apex developers will love this because they don't have to take that Json document and convert it into the individual insert update delete statement so it's all just kind of magic for us and so I I know we have one other feature that I'd like you to comment on and that's with JavaScript stored procedures and can you talk about the benefits we have there yeah of course Oracle for many original came with something called plsql story procedures which all all you Apex veterans out there I'm sure are using uh but the New Kids on the Block really like some of the new modern languages and in 23 AI we now offer JavaScript storage procedures as well so the new kids who want to use JavaScript don't want to use plsql can now get what they want yeah and these JavaScript store procedures have a lot of advantages maybe it's the language you know best but it's also uh there's so much open source out there in JavaScript so you can instantly kind repurpose that inside of your Apex app thanks for that and and um other features you want to talk about maybe some SQL enhancements well there's lots more Mike uh one of my favorite things is uh we we have added a whole bunch of little chain adjustments to sqls itself that are popular little extensions that some of the other databases have added over the years and we've added all pretty much all of them into 23 AI uh we've got the uh the group by clause can now Group by you know a number which is the the this the item in your select list kind of thing so you don't have to repeat the select list item over and over again you can have a SQL select statement with just an expression in it no from Clause a lot of little things that a lot of developers really will appreciate yeah it's great to see all this attention in database 23 a for developers it's really nice I'm sure our Apex developers are really going to like these SQL enhancements just makes life easier it's all good so I know that um another core advantage of the database platform is something we call autonomous database and it is really beneficial to Apex developers because they can focus on building apps and not building infrastructure and so maybe you can comment on the autonomous database and some of the key benefits we have with it yeah I know a lot of you out there are still using oral databases and Apex on Prem or on your laptops but the future is is really the cloud you all know 10 whatever number of years it's going to take you're all moving to the cloud um and what we've done with the database is just amazing as far as going from an on-prem experience where Oracle is sort of known to be sort of complicated you know deploying and provisioning Oracle databases and rack clusters and X dat boxes you know that's not not something developers really want to bother with so in the cloud now we have a full self-service experience where you can just go to the console say provision me an autonomous database um I want so much storage so many CPUs you push the button and you're done and you get your full power of the Oracle database running on an exit infrastructure you know with Apex pre-integrated um all ready to go and it's just a really great experience um you know there's a paid version of this of course for running your production apps but as you as we all know developers like free stuff and so we have an always free version of of autonomous database available on our Cloud as well and so we welcome you all to come to our cloud and try it out out yes I strongly encourage I know many of people in the Apex Community have used the always free autonomous database with uh 23 Ai and Vector search and all these fun things but if you haven't I really encourage you to do that because it it is really cool technology it's great to get exposed to it so I I know Apex developers are really going to like the autonomous database and the an ability to move on premise to 8B and um just really want to thank you for coming yeah it was great having the opportunity to talk to the AP Pi Community out there um try out all these great new products they're really exciting thanks Andy we covered a lot of ground today we talked about gen Apex assistant Vector search but what's really important is you guys give it a try and see what you think it's available now it's released today go for it thank you for a great session Mike and for everyone watching if you want to get your hands on apex visit us online to see more use cases to set up your own workspace and try it yourself for free we love free thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time bye [Music]