> The other is that nobody, if they can help it, uses ApEx.

Oh oh. I worked for more than two years with a team that continued to expand their investment in Oracle and Apex.

When everything you know is Oracle, everything looks like a task for Oracle ;-)

That was my experience too, I worked on ApEx stuff for around 2 years.

It came free with the database license, so it got used.

I don't miss it.

I've had really positive experiences with APEX. If you already have an Oracle DB, it's hard to beat for quickly standing up data centric business apps.

I'm curious - what made your experience negative?

It's fine if you paint inside the lines. For quick CRUD stuff it was fine.

As soon as you need something that doesn't quite fit the limited palette, you need to go underneath and write PL/SQL.

Not as much fun.

In my experience, nothing stays pure CRUD forever.

Disclaimer: APEX dev team member here. Independent of APEX and even the Oracle database, if you are not using stored procedures, you are not using the database efficiently. See e.g. this presentation for a performance analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfkph4lXmKU

Right, but it's not for developers. It's for users who would otherwise have knocked something together in Access. At least it gets them onto managed infrastructure rather than running it on their own PC for their workgroup...

I actually used to describe it as "Access, for the 90s web, for Oracle".

That said, I'd be surprised if many places have it as easily available to end users as Access.

Yes, but you do have PL/SQL to fall back on. It can be very useful.