Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
C H A P T E R 7
Improving Application Performance
Performance has always been a big issue when it comes to Rapid Application Development (RAD). Most
developers generally share the same opinion: if it's that fast and easy to create an application, the
developer will have to "pay the price" elsewhere in terms of tool flexibility or application performance.
While this may hold true for other less integrated RAD tools (and to a much lesser degree for APEX),
there has been no other RAD tool quite like APEX. The entire business logic layer in APEX is written in
PL/SQL and hence executes within the context of the database—leading to far better performance than
with other tools. In fact, APEX is commonly used to host mission critical applications. The APEX
platform has been used to handle thousands of online transactions daily for an online e-commerce site
based in Singapore, to create an application to handle millions of voters in Ukraine, and to handle the
thousands of leads and opportunities captured hourly during nationwide roadshows held in Malaysia.
The bottom line: APEX performance is good enough to handle usage-heavy scenarios.
APEX performance can, however, be further improved through a mixture of caching, SQL query
design, and best practices. The recipes in this chapter will give you an idea how to achieve this improved
performance.
7-1. Measuring Page Access Frequency
Problem
Not every page in your application will be performance critical. Before you begin on any performance
tuning task, you need to know which pages are in need of performance tuning—the ones that are
accessed most frequently by your end users.
Solution
To measure page access frequency using the Monitor Activity tool, follow these instructions:
1.
Login to APEX and click the large Administration icon.
2.
You should see four icons, two of which are labeled Monitor Activity and
Dashboards (as shown in Figure 7-1).
