Apex Application Development is said to make it possible to develop and deploy data-driven enterprise applications quickly and easily.

Oracle claims it makes it possible to build enterprise applications for desktops and mobile devices 38 times faster and without having to learn complex, full-stack technologies. Instead, Apex Application Development allows developers to focus on the business problems rather than the technology.

Developers can start building low-code applications for free using the new Apex Application Development service within the Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Oracle Apex itself has been available since 2004, and Apex applications are used today by tens of millions of users worldwide.

Apex based apps are backed by Oracle Autonomous Database.

"Oracle is investing heavily in our developer communities in areas like open source contributions, developer events, educational programs, free hands-on labs and the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Our new Apex service reinforces our commitment to maintain and expand our Apex developer community," said Oracle executive vice president for database server technologies Andrew Mendelsohn.

"The Apex service enables citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy beautiful, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort. Apex is powerful enough to build the vast majority of your data-driven applications. Building data-driven applications with traditional coding should now be the
exception rather than the rule."

Outside the free tier, the Apex Application Development service is a single, all-inclusive package, with no extra fees per user, per developer, or per application. Data transfer into and out of Apex Application Development is also included in the price.

The package includes Oracle Autonomous Database and a pre-configured middle tier with Oracle Rest Data Services (ORDS) and SQL Developer Web.

Developers can dynamically scale hardware resources to fit the changing needs of their applications. Auto-scaling works in both directions, so customers only need to pay for the capacity they actually need and use.

Where traditional coding is necessary, Apex Application Development can be upgraded to a full Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database with support for the full Oracle Database client APIs, SQL*Net, and Autonomous Data Guard as well as Apex.

Oracle Database 21c is now available on Oracle Cloud, including the always free tier of Oracle Autonomous Database.

New and improved features in Oracle Database 21c include immutable blockchain tables, In-Database JavaScript, native JSON binary data type, AutoML for in-database machine learning (ML), persistent memory store, and enhancements for in-memory, graph processing performance, sharding, multitenant, and security.

Multi-model, multi-workload, and multi-tenant requirements are accommodated within a single, modern converged database engine.

"Oracle Database 21c continues our strategy of delivering the world's most powerful converged database engine," said Mendelsohn.

"It provides leading JSON document processing performance. It provides breakthrough operational database performance with Intel Optane persistent memory support. It provides industry-leading analytic database capabilities with new self-managing in-memory column store, highest performance graph processing, and AutoML for simplest machine learning model development.

"It provides immutable blockchain tables for tamperproof SQL tables. Competing vendors require separate JSON document, operational, analytic, graph, ML, and blockchain databases and services to support these capabilities. Oracle's converged database approach makes developers far more productive when building new applications, and makes it easy to later evolve applications to meet new business requirements."

IDC research vice president for data management software Carl Olofson said "With the launch of Database 21c, Oracle has elevated its flagship database to a new level of convergence with broad support for a wide variety data types and workloads.

"The 200 new built-in innovations, including immutable blockchain tables and AutoML for in-database machine learning, elevate Oracle Database 21c to a new level of functionality, eliminating the need for specialised, isolated cloud services and tools to do those jobs.

"Users can avoid the compounding of costs and operational complexity that comes with each additional cloud service that organisations ordinarily use. In this way, Oracle is effectively slicing away at this disjointed set of services with a simplified, more technically elegant, and integrated approach that is far better suited for the enterprise needs of 2021."