Oracle REST Data Services v20.2 is now Available!

What’s new?

A ton of bug fixes, some of those courtesy of Oracle JDBC 19c driver patches. All of our DBTools are running the latest versions of the JDBC driver, and you should see noticeable improvements in performance and reliability.

Otherwise the big news is around the DB API and SQL Developer Web.

Database Actions/SQL Developer Web

The cards you see here will depend on database user’s privs/roles.

It’s still SQL Developer Web at heart…so why the new name? This code runs both in OCI and on-premises. We want these features to be a core part of your Oracle Database Cloud experience. And we’re working on making this available out-of-the-box for your Oracle Databases running in your data centers as well. So while it’s SQL Developer Web at heart (same features, same code, same development team), we’re elevating it up from a separate product and into the database experience itself.

The navigation is also big different. You get a new home page, with quick navigation links to go ‘do stuff.’ Instead of menu’s up top, there’s a slide out navigation menu on the upper left –

You’ll notice a new screen available under ‘Monitoring.’

The Instance Viewer

This should look familiar if you’ve ever used the DBA features in SQL Developer (desktop). We’ve basically ported it from Java FX to pure Oracle JET powered by REST APIs (delivered by ORDS). It’s even got the drill down support on the various components.

Here’s a quick demo, plus a look at navigation now via the slide out drawer.

This takes about a minute to play through…I’ll do an actual video tour soon.

Loading Data

Have some data stored in Avro, JSON, or even XML? Want to load it as a ‘flat’, relational table? You can do that now!

The Avro file comes with a SCHEMA to define the JSON.

The top level attributes will come in as new columns to our new table. If there’s nested data, it’ll come in a CLOB/VARCHAR with the IS_JSON property, and the raw data will remain.

Like I said, it’ll take your XML too!

I HATE using SQL to go at XML source, I want it in a TABLE!

This is wicked cool, and I’ve been waiting on this feature for a long time. More demo/fun to come later.

DB API

Would you like a 100+ more REST APIs to help monitor and mange your Oracle Database? Well, then you should be happy. We’ve got the beginnings of support for Open Service Broker (K8s), APEX monitoring, and ALL of our old SQL Developer desktop reports loaded as GET end points.

There’s about 5 APEX items, 3 Open Service Broker, and roughly 100 Reporting endpoints to explore.

The bug fixes

I don’t want to de-emphasize these vs the new features. We’ve fixed a TON of issues. You can read all about them here. But the number one reason is probably to uptake all the JDBC driver patches.