Hello everyone,
I would like to get some advice from organizations running Oracle APEX at scale.
We are a software vendor whose primary ERP product is built entirely on Oracle APEX. We currently support several hundred customers, each running their own on-premises Oracle Database and APEX environment.
Our ecosystem currently consists of:
- More than 100 APEX applications
- Average application size of ~200 pages
- Some applications exceeding 400 pages
- Shared plugins, static files, and common components
Today, application distribution is performed through our own deployment framework, and the deployment process itself is executed through PL/SQL routines.
The challenge we are facing is deployment time.
A full application deployment takes approximately 6 minutes on average. While this may not seem excessive for a single application, a typical release package may contain updates for 10 or more applications, resulting in approximately 1 hour of deployment time.
In larger scenarios, where multiple releases must be applied, deployment windows can become several hours long. Since most customers operate with predefined maintenance windows, this is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
To mitigate this issue, we already support page-level deployments, which significantly reduces deployment time in many cases. However, there are still situations where a full application deployment is required, such as:
- Shared component changes
- Application-level settings
- Navigation/menu changes
- Security and authorization changes
Given this scenario, I would like to understand:
- Are there any recommended Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) strategies for Oracle APEX in on-premises environments?
- What deployment approaches are being used by other large APEX vendors or enterprises?
- Are there techniques to significantly reduce application import times?
- Has anyone successfully implemented parallel deployment, blue/green deployment, or similar approaches for APEX applications?
- Are there Oracle-recommended best practices for minimizing application downtime during APEX releases?
Our current platform versions are:
- Oracle Database 19c Standard Edition 2 (19.0.0)
- Oracle APEX 24.1.8
Any experiences, recommendations, architectural approaches, or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.