Richard Martens

Richard Martens has been involved in information technology for more than 20 years. He started as a web developer using the Oracle database as no more than data storage. Richard has been responsible for major European multilingual websites and has been working with the Oracle database since 2000. During those years, he developed himself using a multitude of technologies and specialized in PL/SQL and Oracle APEX. With APEX, he combines the things he loves most: the Oracle database and web technologies.

The kanban game for developers and business-analysts

18 May 2019 by Richard Martens

It was March 2018 when Jasper Alblas and Frans Jacobs introduced me to a real nice way of explaining the advantages of Kanban within a Scrum environment. In the Agile world, Kanban and Scrum have been seen as separate frameworks / practices, but as we all know Scrum teams actually practive Kanban as well. With … Read more

And that’s how the cookie crumbles

24 September 20231 November 2018 by Richard Martens

owa_cookie.send does not write the cookie to the browser because the “Reload on Submit” setting is not set at page level.

On APEX LOV’s and how to define their queries

13 October 2018 by Richard Martens

The goal in defining LOV queries is to have them stored in a compiled way, having the benefit of database dependencies and making use of the SQL optimizer.

Make tomcat wait until oracle database is available

5 October 2018 by Richard Martens

Recently I’ve been installing the OATOA (Oracle APEX on Tomcat with ORDS behind Apache) stack a number of times on both Oracle Linux 7 and CentOS7. In the past this was no problem, Tomcat came up and a request to http://myserver:8080/ords/ gave me the expected APEX login screen. However since Oracle Linux 7 and CentOS7, … Read more

The request could not be mapped to any database

5 October 2018 by Richard Martens

Today I figured out to my shame that the mentioned error by ORDS 3 has a really, REALLY simple cause… the password was expired. Logging in (using SQL-plus) revealed this elegantly: The second one of course did the trick. Regards, Richard

Disabling Apex items the right way

8 July 202515 November 2016 by Richard Martens

Sometimes you want to show data without the user being able to change it. The easiest way in Apex to use reports and read only items. There are use cases however for which this is not good enough.For example when you want to change from read only to editable item dynamically or vv. Or if … Read more

APEX: Validate user input – Riga Dev Days 2016

2 March 2016 by Richard Martens

This 2016 presentation was also integraly put on youtube. Please watch the video, it still is relevant.

Google Apps integration in Oracle APEX – Riga Dev Days 2016

2 March 2016 by Richard Martens

I did this presentation on how to integrate Google Apps in APEX throughout Europe (Netherlands, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia, Germany) and even at kScope (Miami). The guys at Riga DEV days (Latvia) made a complete video for you to enjoy

making https (webservice) requests from PL/SQL without a wallet

21 September 20239 July 2015 by Richard Martens

While developing the application for my kscope15 presentation I discovered that my Oracle XE database is unable to handle the certificate for Linked-in. This has to do with the algorithm used to sign the Linked-in certificate. Oracle XE 11 has a bug that prevents it from handling the certificate correctly. The solution lies in creating … Read more

Calculate time difference between log-entries

24 September 202316 June 2011 by Richard Martens

For me, myself and I (as a reminder) 🙂 I needed to calculate the difference between a log entry and the previous log-entry to be able to investigate where performance was dropping: With alittle bit of help here and here I figured out how to do it: