In today’s blog post I’ll explain what OData is about and go into details on my reasoning why Oracle in general and APEX in particular should support the OData standard.

NOTE: This is a blog post I prepared before I went to APEX Connect 2016 in Berlin. But I didn’t manage to verify and post in time. I’ve now slightly edited and added some details I learned about while being at APEX Connect.

OData is a new standardized protocol based on REST. It’s platform independent and uses HTTP, REST, JSON, XML. It basically allows you to do all operations you’d normally do in SQL in a transparent way.

So, if you want the short version why I think Oracle should support OData: Because Microsoft and SAP do and because it’s an open standard here to stay.

Microsoft Office 365,  Sharepoint, SQL Server, IBM DB2, SAP Netweaver and SAP HANA are a few of the products that either support OData natively or via a plugin.

Imagine defining an APEX Interactive Grid against a SAP HANA table without having to write any PL/SQL code or needing to write separate web-services for each of the operations / tables you work with.

Continue reading Why I think APEX should support OData (“SQL for the web”) →