ORACLE APEX · 26.1 Why Your Reporting Backlog Never Gets Shorter (And How Oracle APEX Data Reporter Fixes That) What it's actually like to set up Data Reporter, including the part where I got it wrong twice. If you've built anything in Oracle APEX for long enough, you've had this exact conversation. Someone from finance messages you: can we get a report showing X, filtered by Y, broken down by Z. You add it to the backlog. Three weeks later you're finally writing the SQL, and by then the question has moved on to something else entirely. Honestly, APEX isn't really the problem here. Report authoring and application development have just always been tangled together every report, however small, had to go through a developer, a Page Designer session, a review, a deployment. Oracle APEX 26.1 ships a new module called Data Reporter that tries to untangle that. It sits next to App Builder and SQL Workshop, and the idea is that business users build a...
Oracle APEX · Feature Spotlight You Can Now Just Talk to Your APEX Reports Interactive Reports just picked up a natural-language layer. Type what you want to see — even against a plain old EMP table — and the report configures itself. No menu-hunting required. salesmen earning over 3000, sorted by salary Filter: JOB = SALESMAN Filter: SAL > 3000 Sort: SAL ↓ So what actually changes Say you're sitting on the classic EMP table and you type "salesmen earning over 3000, sorted by salary." Instead of opening a filter dialog, setting JOB equal to SALESMAN, adding a condition on SAL, and then sorting the column yourself, the report just rearranges itself. The filter on JOB gets applied, the SAL > 3000 condition drops in, the sort order updates — and you're looking at exactly what you asked for, without ever opening a menu. What's happening underneath is less magical than it sounds...