Friday, January 21, 2011

Is anyone using Oracle Application Express?

Is anyone really using Oracle Application Express? I couldn't tell you the number of times I've been asked that question by customers. There's been little marketing of APEX (in part because the marketing dollars flow to for-cost products & features), yet I believe it's grown organically at a high rate over the last few years.

Iloon Ellen-Wolf from Oracle Support provided a list of all of the customers who have filed a Service Request against Application Express through Oracle Support over the last two calendar years - all 1,723 of them. And as I often say, it's a virtual who's who of the Fortune 1000.

Recently, Kris Rice was kind enough to aggregate the Oracle Technology Network download numbers of Application Express over the last few years, and it shows a nice trend:


2006 83,482
2007 107,021
2008 119,092
2009 148,304
2010 209,555


In 3 years, we have doubled the number of downloads of Oracle Application Express. It's difficult to extrapolate this to "number of users" or "number of developers", because a single instance of Oracle Application Express can suffice for hundreds of workspaces and thousands of developers and even more end-users (for example, within Oracle we have one APEX application used by 40,000 distinct users on a daily basis). Other customers download Application Express for their personal use on XE. So the number of developers and users per download is somewhere between 1 and "a plethora."

Activity on apex.oracle.com continues to be very brisk. We typically average well over 4 million page views per week and over 500 new workspaces every week. For the past 7 days:



Total Page Views: 4,882,817
Distinct Applications: 3,644
Distinct Users: 4,141
Number of Workspaces: 10,777
Number of Applications: 37,883
Workspaces Approved: 535
Workspaces Purged: 578
To be purged in a week: 594

535 new users in the past week alone kicking the tires of Oracle Application Express can't be all that bad.

So back to my original question - is anyone using Oracle Application Express? Yes, without a doubt - and it continues to grow.

8 comments:

Dan McGhan said...

Joel,

That's always great to hear! Looking forward to the stats for 2011.

Regards,
Dan

Byte64 said...

Impressive figures, even considering that, for various reasons, i might have been downloading apex from OTN at least a couple of times per new release, plus some extra times at customer's site.

Regards
Flavio

mbannen said...

Hi Joel -- What's the current infrastructure for apex.oracle.com (server, cpu, disk, os)? I know it was posted quiet a while ago.

This is always helpful info for making the case Apex can scale.

Joel R. Kallman said...

@Michael - believe it or not, it hasn't changed. It's still the same Dell PE 1950 with 2 dual-core Xeon CPUs (2.33 GHz), 32 GB of RAM. I just started the process today with IT to get us a new machine.

Jan Navratil said...

Nice stats - lets experiment with numbers:

We & our customers probably account for 50 of those 209.000 downloads in 2010.

Our APEX apps were serving over 250.000 end users in 2010.

It gives us ratio 250.000 / 50 = 5.000 users / download.

Assuming the other downloads have similar "conversion ratio" we can put it together:
209.000 x 5.000 = 1.045.000.000

Yes, it's proven now: APEX is used by more than 1 billion of users.

I love statistics :-)

Shravan V said...

This is quite an encouraging news for all the Database Developers who want to showcase their newly (or recently) found web development oppty.

GMC said...

Hi Joel,

I am currently facing some difficulties searching who is using APEX in a country !
-Google INURL don't reply efficiently
- No way to search on META xmlns:htmldb="http://apex.oracle.com
- no HTML source search engines
...
Have you an idea ?
Thanks a lot.
Gaetano

Joel R. Kallman said...

Hi Gaetano,

What country are you most interested in?

Joel