The DBMS_PROFILER companion for Oracle Apex is (finally) available

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The DBMS_PROFILER companion for Oracle Application Express that i presented at Oracle Open World 2008 is finally available for download.

Since i came back from OOW, i spent most of my spare time testing and checking the installation and deinstallation scripts, which was a non trivial task for an application that can work in a variety of possible configurations, although it is supposed to install and uninstall itself in an almost point and click fashion.
I've also invested some time improving the look and feel of the application compared to the initial version and writing the on line help for each page. There are also a few new features compared to the preliminary version i presented in San Francisco, most of them deal with automatic installation checks, auto-testing and migrating existing data.

Most of the working details are covered by the on-line help inside the application, whilst the installation details are given in the download page, so i am not going to write this stuff twice here, but let me recap the main goals of this application:

1. to provide a human understandable format for the output of Oracle's built-in PL/SQL profiler;
2. to minimize the cost/benefit ratio of using the DBMS_PROFILER for optimizing your PL/SQL code. That's the easy bit as this tool costs zero to you ;-)
3. to take charge of some annoying operations like checking if the repository user was granted the debug privilege, checking if all the required objects are properly installed, providing a sample procedure to perform a test and so on.
   
4. to show you that Apex is cool for developing productivity tools like this one.

When i presented the application at OOW i remarked the fact that it took very little time to develop a working application with Oracle Apex: that statement still holds today for an application created for internal use without all the bells and whistles that are necessary when you want to distribute the software to the general public. As you can easily guess, writing the help and designing the installation/deinstallation scripts plus all the auto-check functionality is a time consuming task that is usually not necessary when the application is only used by selected individuals or within a small development team.

Hopefully i'll find the time in the next days to come up with some video about installing and using this tool, but for now, this is it.

Although i spent quite a lot of time checking, testing, changing, amending and so on, the current version should be considered a beta release.

See more articles about Oracle Application Express or download tools and utilities.