Data Centric

APEX was designed to produce applications that store, retrieve, manipulate, and display data, from Oracle Databases. This means that if your application's main logic doesn't revolve around data manipulation, it may be that APEX is not your optimal application development tool. However, if data manipulation is at the heart of your application, APEX could be your best bet.

APEX is actually a collection of PL/SQL packages, which "live" inside the Oracle database. It means that APEX automatically inherits all the outstanding features, often mentioned with regards to the Oracle database environment: high performance, robustness, reliability, enhanced security, scalability, and more. In addition, APEX can natively utilize the very rich SQL and PL/SQL environment, including the built-in packages that the Oracle database has to offer, and use them to manipulate the data in the optimal ways a RDBMS can offer.

Moreover, APEX can utilize special functionality features that are included in the various database versions and editions, like Oracle XML DB, Oracle Text, and Oracle Multimedia.

Another advantage in this context is that, like the client side which relies on Web browsers to gain hardware independence, (alongside operating system independence), the APEX engine relies on the database platform for the same purpose. As long as we have a proper running version of an Oracle database, starting with Oracle database 9.2.0.3 and above (including the free version, Oracle XE), we can ignore the hardware and operating systems aspects of the server.