About sustainability & Oracle APEX

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The climate crises is here and immediate counteracting is required to prevent worse. Key is to take into account environmental and social aspects in each buying decision. Above all, a sustainable planet requires developed countries to consume less, a lot less.

Starting at 2025, businesses in Europe need to report their carbon footprint besides the usual regulatory financial reporting. Regarding IT, this includes the carbon footprint produced by hardware. A better utilization rate of hardware leads to less hardware required. Companies like Vodafone monitor the utilization rate of their servers as well as the power consumption for each infrastructure component using Oracle Application Express (APEX) to reduce the carbon footprint of their data center.

On software level, program code affects the required energy consumption. For example, in terms of database usage, are all records read out even if only one record is required? In terms of storage: do we really need to keep data stored infinitely?

Low-code platforms like Oracle Application Express (APEX) are based on PL/SQL and also create a carbon footprint when used. However, APEX has some distinct advantages compared to other low-code platforms or programming languages in the market:

- APEX completely runs in the Oracle Database. Because of this, there is no network traffic taking place between APEX and its underlying database in which it was installed. Other low-code platforms have an application server running separately that requests and caches the data over the network from a database server.

- Persistent data saves energy. For instance, it is better to read out the configuration of a table instead of using lots of constants in your code. Both APEX and its Java-based gateway Oracle REST Data Service (ORDS) store their metadata in the database, not in memory.

- A single ORDS connection pool can be used in front of multiple Pluggable Databases, thereby greatly reducing the required database sessions and better utilization of the underlying hardware.

- APEX applications, including APEX itself, are based on PL/SQL, a data-centric procedural programming language that runs in the Oracle Database. Instead of being interpreted at run-time, PL/SQL is compiled during design-time thereby reducing the CPU-load.

- By using a cloud provider for APEX, the underlying hardware can be better utilized. For example, the public multi-tenant APEX instance apex.oracle.com hosts over 229,000 applications with in total 6,000,000 pages across 116,000 workspaces (tenants) and currently runs on an (outdated) quarter Oracle Exadata rack.

- APEX runs best on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle is committed to use 100% renewable energy by 2025, not limited to OCI.*

In general, APEX applications are largely used for digitalizing business processes, thereby replacing manual CO2-producing processes like sending e-mails, printing or sending a fax. Some applications are even used by companies which mission it is to help healing our planet. Some of them are listed here: http://sustainability-apex.org/. If you have an APEX app that contributes as well, feel free to submit it.

I can imagine that there is a lot more to say about sustainability related to APEX. I am happy to update this post based on your comments.


*) https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/

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