Friday, August 08, 2008

Oracle Application Express and Oracle MetaLink

When customers have questions about the scalability of Oracle Application Express or Oracle’s commitment to Application Express, the use of Application Express in Oracle MetaLink is often cited by other customers.

Recently, an e-mail from the Oracle MetaLink team went out to MetaLink users, inviting them to try out the new Oracle MetaLink and get their feedback. The new MetaLink is not written with Oracle Application Express, prompting some customers to write an e-mail to me and ask me what’s going on. There was also a recent discussion on one of the ODTUG mailing lists about this very topic. Here are some statements which will undoubtedly be inferred from this change:

  1. Oracle is no longer committed to Oracle Application Express
  2. Oracle Application Express couldn’t handled the scalability needs of Oracle MetaLink

Let me say that both of these statements are false.

Oracle acquired many companies and products over the past few years. Included in these acquisitions was software to help manage the customer relationship. This really became a business decision of either continuing to maintain and extend custom-written software in Oracle Application Express and PL/SQL, or use the off-the-shelf software that Oracle sells. As Tom Kyte often references the “Buy versus Build” decision, this one was even simpler – “Buy versus Own”.

That’s the decision in a nutshell. Anything else inferred from this change would be factually incorrect.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know about scalability of Metalink on APEX but I hope Oracle will do something about speed ( at times, it takes half a minute just to login ).

I would have thought that Metalink as primary customer support service would reflect "enterprise" meaning somehow.
And I do not think apex is to blame, because Metalink was never decently responsive.

I wonder If they plan to address this ever.

linlasj said...

The switch did have bad effect on the readability. I have not seen anywhere where I can increase the font size.

And flash is not off shelf? Or what did I miss here.