Thursday, March 20, 2014

Yet Another Post How to Link to Download a File or Display an Image from a BLOB column

On an internal mailing list, an employee (Richard, a long-time user of Oracle Application Express) asked:

"...we are attempting to move to storing (the images) in a BLOB column in our own application tables.  Is there no way to display an image outside of page items and reports? "

Basically, he has a bunch of images stored in the BLOB column of the common upload table, APEX_APPLICATION_FILES (or WWV_FLOW_FILES).  He wishes to move them to a table in his workspace schema, but it's unclear to him how they can be displayed.  While there is declarative support for BLOBs in Application Express, there are times where you simply wish to get a link which would return the image - and without having to add a form and report against the table containing the images.

I fully realize that this question has been answered numerous times in various books and blog posts, but I wish to reiterate it here again.

Firstly, a way not to do this is via a PL/SQL procedure that is called directly from a URL.  I see this "solution" commonly documented on the Internet, and in general, it should not be followed.  The default configuration of Oracle Application Express has a white list of entry points, callable from a URL.  For security reasons, you absolutely want to leave this restriction in place and not relax it.  This is specified as the PlsqlRequestValidationFunction for mod_plsql and security.disableDefaultExclusionList for Oracle REST Data Services (nee APEX Listener).  With this default security measure in place, you will not be able to invoke a procedure in your schema from a URL.  Good!

The easiest way to return an image from a URL in an APEX application is either via a RESTful Service or via an On-Demand process.  This blog post will cover the On-Demand process.  It's definitely easier to implement via a RESTful Service, and if you can do it via a RESTful call, that will always be much faster - Kris has a great example how to do this. However, one benefit of doing this via an On Demand process is that it will also be constrained by any conditions or authorization schemes that are in place for your APEX application (that is, if your application requires authentication and authorization, someone won't be able to access the URL unless they are likewise authenticated to your APEX application and fully authorized).

  1. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Items
  2. Click Create
    • Name:  FILE_ID
    • Scope:  Application
    • Session State Protection:  Unrestricted
  3. Navigate to Application Builder -> Shared Components -> Application Processes
  4. Click Create
    • Name: GETIMAGE
    • Point:  On Demand: Run this application process when requested by a page process.
  5. Click Next
  6. For Process Text, enter the following code:

begin
    for c1 in (select *
                 from my_image_table
                where id = :FILE_ID) loop
        --
        sys.htp.init;
        sys.owa_util.mime_header( c1.mime_type, FALSE );
        sys.htp.p('Content-length: ' || sys.dbms_lob.getlength( c1.blob_content));
        sys.htp.p('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' || c1.filename || '"' );
        sys.htp.p('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');  -- tell the browser to cache for one hour, adjust as necessary
        sys.owa_util.http_header_close;
        sys.wpg_docload.download_file( c1.blob_content );
    
        apex_application.stop_apex_engine;
    end loop;
end;

Then, all you need to do is construct a URL in your application which calls this application process, as described in the Application Express Application Builder Users' Guide.  You could manually construct a URL using APEX_UTIL.PREPARE_URL, or specify a link in the declarative attributes of a Report Column.  Just be sure to specify a Request of 'APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE' (or whatever your application process name is).  The URL will look something like:

f?p=&APP_ID.:0:&APP_SESSION.:APPLICATION_PROCESS=GETIMAGE:::FILE_ID:<some_valid_id>

That's all there is to it.

A few closing comments:
  1. Be mindful of the authorization scheme specified for the application process.  By default, the Authorization Scheme will be "Must Not Be Public User", which is normally acceptable for applications requiring authentication.  But also remember that you could restrict these links based upon other authorization schemes too.
  2. If you want to display the image inline instead of being downloaded by a browser, just change the Content-Disposition from 'attachment' to 'inline'.
  3. A reasonable extension and optimization to this code would be to add a version number to your underlying table, increment it every time the file changes, and then reference this file version number in the URL.  Doing this, in combination with a Cache-Control directive in the MIME header would let the client browser cache it for a long time without ever running your On Demand Process again (and thus, saving your valuable database cycles).
  4. Application Processes can also be defined on the page-level, so if you wished to have the download link be constrained by the authorization scheme on a specific page, you could do this too.
  5. Be careful how this is used. If you don't implement some form of browser caching, then a report which displays 500 images inline on a page will result in 500 requests to the APEX engine and database, per user per page view! Ouch! And then it's a matter of time before a DBA starts hunting for the person slamming their database and reports that "APEX is killing our database". There is an excellent explanation of cache headers here.

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Finally...the official sizing guide for Oracle Application Express

The following question was recently posted on an internal mailing list:
"Is there a sizing/capacity/scalability guide available for APEX?"
I'm always fascinated by this question.  I appreciate the fact that this is a standard, acceptable practice in the industry, and people come to expect it.  How else could architects and planners appropriately allocate resources without some form of estimate?  This impacts capital expenditures and budgets and rack space and energy costs and support costs and human capital.  People seem to be looking for some simple formula like:
(X number of pages in an APEX application) * (Y number of concurrent users) = (W number of processors) + (Z number of GB of RAM)
Voila!  Plug that formula into your favorite spreadsheet and away you go.  Well....if I lured you in with the title of this blog post, I have to be honest - it's all fiction.  There is no such thing.  But why not?  There are a number of reasons.

  1. There is no such thing as a representative, typical application.  As I've often bloviated in the past, Oracle Application Express is as fast or as slow as you, the developer, make it.  The overhead associated with the APEX engine itself is fairly static (measured in hundredths of a second). If you have a query that takes 30 seconds to execute and you put this query in a report in an APEX application, you can expect the execution of that page to take just over 30 seconds per page view.

  2. What does "concurrent" mean?  Is that the total number of users in an hour?  Total number of users in a 5-minute interval?  Or is that the high-water mark of number of users all clicking the mouse or hitting the Enter key, all at the same time?

  3. What is the typical "think time" of an end user?  Effectively, resources are only being consumed when there is a request actively being processed by the APEX engine.  So while the end user is interpreting the results of a report or keying in data in a form, they aren't (typically) making any requests to the APEX engine.

  4. How much memory will be consumed by the typical page view?  Does your application allocate GB's of in-memory LOBs, per user per page view?  This would have a definite impact on scalability.
The total number of pages in an application has close to zero correlation to scalability and throughput.  You can have a 1,000-page application, each page with sub-second performance, which will be far more scalable than a 1-page application that consumes 15 seconds per page view.

As the Oracle Database Performance and Tuning Guide states, there are many variables involved in workload estimation, and it's typically done via either benchmarking or extrapolation from a similar system.  But what is "a similar system" for an APEX application?  Does a call-center application at one enterprise approximate the back-office order processing system at another company?

I can understand how a formula can be prepared for a COTS application.  If you're deploying Fusion Applications or the eBusiness Suite or JD Edwards or SAP, those applications are created, the business logic is written, the queries and transactions are crafted, and concurrency has been measured on representative systems for a given workload.  But I don't understand how someone can produce a sizing guide for any application development framework - Application Express, ADF, .NET, Java.  It's like asking "how scalable is C?"

An application that our team wrote and runs for Oracle is quite scalable (the oft-mentioned Aria People employee directory).  Yesterday (05-MAR), there were 2.1M page views on this system with a median page rendering time of 0.03 seconds from 45,314 distinct users.  The busiest hour saw 129,284 page views through the APEX engine (35.9 page views/second).  If another team within Oracle wrote this same system but didn't tune the SQL like we did, is that a reflection on the scalability of APEX?  And if the answer to that question is "no", then is the hardware configuration all that relevant?

Back in 2007, my manager Mike Hichwa took a draft note that I wrote and published an article for  Oracle Magazine entitled "Sizing up Performance".  There is a very simple formula which can be used to estimate the throughput of an APEX application.  This isn't going to help you determine how much hardware to buy or how to estimate the size of your VM, but it will help estimate (in back-of-the-napkin form) how scalable an existing APEX application will be on an existing system.

With all this said, we, on the Oracle Application Express team, have been deficient.  At a minimum, we should have a list of systems developed by our customers, with specific information about the hardware configuration, purpose of the system, and number of end-users served.  Maybe we should also obtain the level of expertise of the developers.  We will gather this information and publish it online (without specific customer names).  If nothing else, this can serve as the foundation for extrapolation by architects and designers.