Beginning Oracle® Application Express

12.1. Why Migrate?

It's always good (although not required) to understand why you would want to do something before you leap into the task itself.

There are three broad areas where APEX has advantages over Access: administrator productivity, developer productivity, and the inherent strength of the Oracle stack versus Access.

12.1.1. Administrator Productivity

The first main area of APEX advantages is improved administrator productivity. As a developer, you may not necessarily give a lot of thought to the time and resources required to handle the administrative tasks necessary to support your applications and, more importantly, the data they use.

But you should remember that the source of value in information systems is, well, the information they store and present. This information stems from the underlying data and is shaped by the applications and reports you create. Lose your data, and you also lose all its stored value.

Administrators safeguard this value with maintenance and protection. Your data and applications must be regularly backed up, and those backups must be occasionally tested to insure that the backup routines are working properly. The larger the amount of data, the more value it represents, the more protection it needs, and the longer those tasks take. If you could combine the data from multiple applications into a single Oracle database, the backup procedures for all that data could be handled in a single job, and Oracle backup routines are optimized for large ...