What's New in APEX 26.1 - Part 1

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:11]Uh, welcome everyone to our Apex office hours. We're very excited to announce the immediate availability of Oracle Apex 26.1.

[00:00:20]Uh, my name is Mark Zaves. I'm senior director of development for Oracle Apex and together with several members of our team, we're going to show you some of our new innovations in this release today. If you have any questions throughout this webinar, uh please post your questions in the Q&A.

[00:00:38]All right. Uh so the past two years, it's become very clear to us that AI is going to fundamentally change uh how applications are going to be built and how users interact with them. So rather than simply adding a few AI features here and there uh and we made the deliberate choice to invest deeply into bring AI into the core of the Apex platform.

[00:01:00]The result is one of the most significant releases we've ever delivered enterprise low code uh for the AI area. Apex 26.1 brings AI into declarative platform designed for trust.

[00:01:12]So instead of generating uh large volumes of uh code like many AI platforms do uh with Apex uh and AI and Apex you generate uh structured declarative metadata you generate what you generate your own. So with Apex you generating understandable transparent and governed code uh from the start.

[00:01:37]Apex 26.1 is centered on three major innovations. Uh we have Apex Lang, AI reporting and AI agents.

[00:01:45]And we're going to talk about all of these during today's office hours. And we're going to have several deep dive office hours in the coming weeks.

[00:01:54]Apex Lang is the most important update uh since we started with Apex. We've engineered Apex Lang from the ground up to exploit generative AI. It's an open application specification language that humans and AI agents can read and modify and edit.

[00:02:12]We've also added natural language capabilities to interactive reports, our most popular reporting component in Apex.

[00:02:19]And we introducing AI agents uh that allow you to allow your applications to take safe declarative actions in your applications.

[00:02:30]Apex is available today. You can download it from OTN. You can also try it out on oracle.com.

[00:02:38]Oracleapex.com is our hosted public evaluation instance. It's a new URL for what was apexoracle.com before. Apex.com still redirects, but Oracle Apex.com is our new URL. And this instance has been upgraded to apex26.1 overnight. So when you go there now and log into your workspace, you'll see Apex 26.1.

[00:03:02]The instance has just been upgraded. Uh so there still might be some hiccups. Uh so if you run into any issues, any cash caching issues or something like that, uh uh kill your cache or try again. Uh that instance is available. Now I know many of you are going to ask uh when it's coming to the cloud. Uh so Apex 26.1 is going to be rolled out across OCI regions and ORX multicloud uh in the coming weeks and I have a link here to our what's new page oracle.com/apex what's new that's our new feature page for Apex26.1 and when you go to oracle.com/apex you'll find all the links to our documentation release notes Apex resources uh videos and feature deep dives oracle.com /apex is our new homepage for Apex. Uh again, Apex oracle.com was our landing page before.

[00:03:57]Oracle.com/apex is now where you find all the Apex uh content.

[00:04:06]With Apex 26.1, we are still supporting the database 19c.

[00:04:12]If you're running Apex 26.1 on 19c though the minimum release update is version 19.18 uh which came out in January or of course any newer uh release update than that. If you're running Oracle 26.1 on the database 26AI the minimum version is 23.26.0 which came out in October.

[00:04:37]Apex continues to run on all editions, enterprise edition, stand edition, and uh the free database Oracle AI database 26 AI free.

[00:04:46]Uh what's new is that uh with Apex 26.1, you also need to run the latest version of OS Oracle uh OS 26.11 or newer. Along with the release of Apex 26.1 today, uh we also uh released new versions of OS of SQL CL and the VS code extens uh the SQL developer VS code extension. I'll do a little bit of a demo a little bit later. So you'll see how all these tools play together.

[00:05:20]All right, so we're going to have a series of Apex office hours in the coming weeks. Today we're going to cover some of the key innovations in this release at a high level and then in the coming weeks we're going to go into deep dives on all the different uh new features.

[00:05:36]The schedule may change a little bit. We may shuffle a few things around uh but for now the plan is to cover Apex slang in more detail uh next week. Then talk about AI integration and tools uh May 28th. then cover AI interactive reports and data reporter in depth uh on June 4th. going to talk about all the things we've done for the developer experience uh on June 11th and then we're going to skip a week for ODAK scope our big conference and then on June 25th we're going to have workflow facet search rest maps and other new features right we're going to have a number of team members uh show you a few uh updates along around our innovations today I'm going to start with a brief update on Apex lang. Of course, there's going to be a lot more coming in the coming weeks.

[00:06:31]Now, what is Apex Lang? Apex lang is an open application specification language that provides a declarative human readable textbased representation of Apex metadata.

[00:06:42]So, what does that mean? Uh, most of you are familiar with our Apex export import files in SQL format. our SQL API calls that they are always a little bit cryptic and hard to read and hard to diff. Uh with Apex, uh we are now introducing a human readable textbased representation, meaning you get a zip file that contains uh all the components that make up your application in individual files, APX files that contain the readable metadata of all your pages, uh shortcut share components, uh embedded code, and everything that makes up your application.

[00:07:20]It looks and feels and works similar to our YAML based export import that we had which is now replaced with Apex Lang.

[00:07:27]But the key difference of course is that it's now an officially supported and editable and importable uh export import format.

[00:07:35]Uh so you can edit your files, create your files in uh text editors like uh SQL for VS code. You can use uh tools like uh SQL CL for exporting and importing uh and you can uh use AI to generate Apex Lang. I included a few stats here on uh what we actually worked on uh for making Apex Lang happen giving you some uh sense of how many components how many properties uh how many uh page items and jet properties we've touched. So it's been a massive effort uh touching pretty much everything in Apex.

[00:08:18]So why are why are we doing this? Uh what problems are we solving with Apex Lang? Well, when you look at most low code platforms today, uh they store applications to application definitions and propriety formats that are opaque uh that are hard to read for humans and certainly for machines. And uh that's certainly been true for our own ape uh apex SQL based exporting performance as well. Uh and that of course creates frictions. It's difficult to version control them uh to code review them to diff them and it's certainly very difficult for AIs to uh make use of them.

[00:08:54]If your AI can't read or write your application format then uh you don't have any visibility into what's changing uh and what is being generated. So Apex Lang eliminates this. uh with Apex slang you have structured and readable files again that can be diffed and and validated and merged.

[00:09:12]So when you don't have uh a uh readable format then uh AIS can't really participate. So why does it matter? Apex Lang gives AI gens including OpenAI codecs, entropic cloud and others a supported interface for generating and modifying your applications, your code. Developers can still build and work with Apex applications in the application builder of course as you do today or you can work entirely through AI gens and AI agents and uh tools like uh VS code or you can do a combination of both. Uh it's your choice. Uh both are still uh certainly valid uh approaches and both still works with Apex Lang. Uh we've updated all our tools. Uh so there's certainly Apex 26.1 but there's also SQL CL which now can export and import uh Apex Lang. The Apex Lang compiler has been built into SQL CL as well as OS. Uh so with SQL CL you can now partake in full CI/CD pipelines and with SQL CL and with the SQL developer for VS code you can now open and edit and review uh Apex Lang files in VS code.

[00:10:32]So why are we saying it's an open application specification language? It's not an open- source uh format in that sense, but it's open uh in that it's a fully documented, readable, extensible language uh that has a documented grammar. It's readable, it's supported.

[00:10:48]Uh so AI agents uh as well as humans can work on these files, modify these files, and generate these files.

[00:10:57]So let's do a quick demo of what that actually looks like.

[00:11:11]All right, I have Apex 26.1 running locally here on my uh laptop. I have a Mac. I have it running in Potman along with OS and SQL CL and VS Code. And I already created pre-created an application here, an order entry application which I want to briefly show you. Then export into Apex Lang, open it up in uh VS Code and show you how you can make modifications.

[00:11:39]And as you can already tell if you've been using Apex for some time, the UI has changed quite a bit. Uh we're going to have Paige walk us through all the changes a little bit later. All right, order entry. Uh this is what the application looks like.

[00:11:58]So very basic application, nice little dashboard uh with some key stats up here, some charts, uh some more charts, some product images and then a number of uh pages for custom order details and so on.

[00:12:13]So very typical Apex application. Uh in the build it looks like this. It has about uh 20 or so pages and I now want to export it into Apex Lang and then edit it in VS Code. Now for that I'm going to go to export import as you would have done in the past. Click on export and then choose whether you want to export into Apex Lang or SQL. So we're still supporting our existing SQL export import format of course but we've added Apex leng uh to the export formats replacing the uh YAML export. You'll also notice that the options have changed a little bit. Uh we added a few preconfigurations for standard exports, runtime exports, full exports and of course you can also customize to what exactly you want to have.

[00:13:02]I'm going to go with a standard export here. Click export.

[00:13:06]This exports the Apex length file uh into my downloads folder.

[00:13:12]There you go.

[00:13:17]And there's my downloads folder. There's my zip file. I can unzip it.

[00:13:22]And here's my uh Apex uh order entry Apex length folder structure. I'm now going to VS Code. And in VS Code, you can install the SQL developer extension.

[00:13:36]Simply go to extensions and look for SQL developer or look for Oracle Apex and that will uh bring up the Oracle SQL developer extension for VS Code. This is version 26.1.2.

[00:13:50]This has also been just been upgraded and this now supports Apex Lang. So this is extension installed.

[00:14:00]I can work with Apex Lang and I have uh my downloads folder opened here. So I have my order entry application and as you can see there are bunch of APX files. Those are all my pages. Down here I have application.appx that is my main application file. You have your settings like navigation settings authorization authentication and so on and your application name. That's at a high level what you are defining for your application. And then you can drill down into your share components as well as your pages. And here for example is my home page dashboard.

[00:14:34]Looks like this. Uh there's my name, there's my alias, uh title, uh security settings and template settings. And then as you scroll through it, you'll find all the different uh regions uh that make up this homepage.

[00:14:50]I do want to make a change and I do want to connect to my local database here.

[00:14:56]I can make changes by hand, right? I can go in and uh change the page name to something else. Uh but I can also uh use tools like uh codeex to make changes for me. We're going to have a whole uh set of skills available uh to help you with this. I don't have any of this installed here right now. Now I just want to make a simple change uh like what I've done here earlier which is uh change like not this one I want to have the orders by month region updated from area to bar.

[00:15:35]So I'm going to copy this run this again change order by month chart to bar chart. So when you look at the application right now, oops, sorry.

[00:15:47]Right now this application has this area chart and I ask uh Codex here to make a change for me and uh that should have done it. So I can now zip everything up again and load it back into Apex or I can directly compile it from here. I do want to zip it up. So, let me just collect all the files.

[00:16:22]I'm going back to Apex.

[00:16:26]Going to the builder homepage.

[00:16:29]I click on import.

[00:16:34]Drop my archive in here.

[00:16:38]That just takes a moment. And uh what this is doing, it's uploading the Apex lang zip file into Apex and then it's calling out to Watts to prompt OS to load the file uh and install it into your workspace. It passes a file. You can auto assign a new application ID or can you reuse the existing application ID then import the application replace the existing one and then when I reload my page here it hopefully should have updated.

[00:17:10]I'm going to log in again because the application just got reinstalled and then I look at my app I now have a bar chart instead of the area charge. So very simple example of course uh we'll show you much more detail later on. Uh but you'll see the very basic workflow how you can now export your applications in apex length format edit it in VS code using uh the uh VS code extension.

[00:17:42]In VS code you'll also see uh syntax highlighting and if I start making changes here is also code completion. Uh so full support for Apex Lang built into the SQL developer extension for VS Code.

[00:17:57]All right.

[00:18:00]So with that I want to hand it over to Zed and Christina for an update on natural language and uh reports.

[00:18:07]>> Hi everyone. Um I'm Zed. Uh so I want to take just a few minutes to introduce and demonstrate um a major new feature in 26.1 that we're calling AI interactive reports. Um so for this feature we had some very simple high level goals. Uh number one to be able to talk to your data and number two to be able to trust the results. Now the trust results portion of it is really important and it's been a an absolutely crucial part of the solution. So what does this all really mean? basically means that you'll be able to ask a question using natural language um and AI will interpret and translate that into interactive report settings. Um let me share my screen and we'll go through a little demo. Um so another thing to to to really kind of mention as well is that for our solution we absolutely don't uh use generated AISQL and and and kind of execute that kind of thing. So you know the solution doesn't use that approach at all. Um and every setting that basically gets applied is applied in the normal IR way as chips. you'll be able to inspect them, look at them, change them manually, carry on doing it conversationally.

[00:19:26]Um, so that's where the trust element comes in because you can see all the workings out just like you normally would. Just like you would normally go into the actions menu and apply settings and everything else, you can now do this through natural language. And that's a really important reason why the architecture we've come up with will will work really well for enterprise apps where you absolutely have to trust the results, which is such a crucial thing when using AI.

[00:19:48]Okay, so I've got a really simple movies application here that you're seeing on your screen hopefully right now. Uh let's jump in and and have a look at what we can do with it. Uh so let's start with some simple ones.

[00:20:01]So I've got a search bar across the top.

[00:20:03]I can put in a natural language question. Uh show me films related to a galaxy far far away. So let's give that a couple of seconds and it should come back with a response.

[00:20:14]Um, and what it's doing is this showcases actually the ability to use, you know, LLM general knowledge and apply it to your data set. So, you can see it's actually filtered that to to all the Star Wars movies here basically.

[00:20:28]Uh, I can also see here on the assistant, oh, I've got I've had a response back. So, I can open up the chat assistant and it'll tell me what it's actually done as well. Okay. Um, so let's take that a step further and ask it to list us all the drama, action, and crime films. And let's see what happens here.

[00:20:52]So, we've made it ultra simple to enable your existing IR ports to be able to get this kind of capability in. It's all declarative. You can add in some additional context uh and and and you'll be able to enable these features really quickly. Um so again it's reset the report and it's and it's kind of applied the filter. As you can see it's applying chips in the normal IR way. Uh they're all inspectable, editable manually as well. So that's all doable in exactly the normal way. Let's ask another question. So now I've asked it to refine the films released in the last refine to show the films released in the last five years. Sort on release date showing the most recent first and only R-rated movies. So there's quite a few bits for it to think about that.

[00:21:36]So you can see what it's done. It's it's uh applied the the in for the genre.

[00:21:41]It's filtered it to those and it's and it's kind of brought back the ones for the last five years and set the order by as well. Okay. So we might be interested in looking at some movies from particular studios. So let's try and highlight those. Let's highlight the Paramount ones in light blue and the Warner ones in gold.

[00:22:05]There you go. So, it's it's highlighted those. Um, so on this particular report, we have a whole bunch of other columns that aren't visible at the moment, but they're all available as well. Um, so if I ask a question like uh include full location and financial details in the report, it should pull in all those additional columns to give us that additional information. And there you go. It's brought in all the financial performance columns including the movie location one as well. Uh, even down to simple things, you know, you probably wouldn't really do this, but just as an example, you know, let's let's remove that release date filter. I don't want that on Morocco anymore.

[00:22:51]and it's taken that off. Um, so I'm I'm kind of happy with this report as it stands. So, you know what? I actually want to save that. So, I've just asked it to save it and give it an appropriate name.

[00:23:08]And there you go. So, you can see it saved it. It's it's given it a name according to what we've asked it to do.

[00:23:16]Okay. Uh let's move on and I want to see something a bit more visual now. So why don't we ask it to give us a pie chart to show us some specific information around the total movie counts by different studios. But I I don't want it to keep it within the context of the current filters. So it it it will take those off as well.

[00:23:43]There you go.

[00:23:46]Uh, let's try a pivot. So, pivots can take a little while sometimes when you're going through the the menus, but now I can just ask what I want. So, show me a pivot of MPA rating versus genre just to see how they kind of distribute.

[00:24:06]And there you go. It's done that as well. So, I'm kind of happy with this pivot, but you know what? I think I actually got it the wrong way round. So, what I want to do is flip that. So, I can just ask it to flip it for me.

[00:24:24]And there you go. So, you can see that those axes have flipped around and it's moved those around as well. Um, equally, I might want to kind of break on certain columns as well. So I can actually ask it to include a franchise column and list the films list those films that part of that franchise and break on that column too. So we can we can get it to give us a nice break by view of that data as well. Um and just a couple more just to show you very quickly. Um, now I want to see all the films that came out in the 80s that won an Oscar.

[00:25:05]Uh, and actually show me the awards that that those movies won and put that column, display that column after the title.

[00:25:21]There you go. So you can see uh we store all the awards in a in a JSON format but it's dropped that column in and it's showing what awards that films won all these and won Oscars as well. So just one final one just to finish that off.

[00:25:41]So now I've asked it to show me refine this list and show me just the ones that have been made in the big apple and also add the location column in. So again, it can interpret Big Apple uh to New York and as you can see, it's filtered out those ones that were made in New York.

[00:25:58]So that's just a very quick overview. So as I say, the whole idea of this is that you know to enable your existing IR reports is a really simple process and we'll do deeper dives into this in future sessions. Uh but it it gives you a flavor of of what we can do with it.

[00:26:12]So that's AI interactive reports. Um I'm now going to hand over to Christina who's going to talk through data reporter. Thanks a lot everyone.

[00:26:24]>> Great. Well, thank you Zed. Um if I can share my screen awesome. Thank you.

[00:26:36]All right.

[00:26:40]All right. So, Zaz talked about how users can talk and gain insights to the reports in natural way with a conversational way. Now, I'm going to show you what data reporter is in Apex and um how it helps. So, data reporter uh is new in Oracle Apex 26.1. It can help organizations or teams to create and share reports as govern self-service ad hoc reporting experiences. It is available directly within Apex as peer of app builder and SQL workshop. Uh data reporter allows editors to build and publish reports on approved data while administrators can uh control the data sets and reporting application access.

[00:27:32]Once the report is designed, uh, published reports can be viewed by the viewers and they can use the natural language that Z uh, demoed to gain the insights of the report data if AI service is configured.

[00:27:49]It is uh simple to set up a data reporter um to uh let users uh or editors or business users to start creating governed reporting applications. At instance level, data reporter authentication scheme needs to be configured. At workspace level, admins needs to define a data set which are curated tables of collection of tables and views uh to allow reporting apps to create the reports on AI service configuration is optional but highly recommended to provide natural language to SQL as well as natural language to interactive report functionalities. So with that let's take a look at what data reporter is.

[00:28:37]Um I have a workspace and instance set up within my workspace. AI service configuration is already done. When I click on data reporter the first time data reporter starts with approved data.

[00:28:52]So admins needs to create a data set first. Let's name this as HR data set.

[00:29:00]and use only the tables. Oh, only the tables with prefix with OEHR prefix.

[00:29:09]So let's create that.

[00:29:13]Now let's create reporting application.

[00:29:17]Reporting application is where editors can create and build reports on approved data. Let's name this as HR management and use the data set.

[00:29:33]Now I can start adding a uh report page.

[00:29:37]Now editors can turn the approved data into interactive report or facet search experience. I'm going to name this as uh employee locations report.

[00:29:50]I can select a table directly from here or if you're not familiar with exact table name, you can ask Apex assistant to compose a query for me. So I'm going to ask assistant to give me all these employee information with uh city and country locations. So let's validate this query. Looks to be fine. So let's use this. Let's edit some of the labels.

[00:30:18]So the UI comes up cleanly and create the report.

[00:30:27]When a report gets created, it gets created as unpublished by default. You can keep it as unpublished until it is ready to be shared. Let's try to preview this. Uh the report seems to be fine. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish it. When I click on edit of this page, I am landed in report detail page instead of the page designer which is the simpler UI. I'm going to publish this report. So my viewers can view this page. Let's run this. And now let's say if my viewers views this report, they can use the same natural language experience that Zeds showed to gain the insights of the report data. So let's try some of these here. Let's ask uh assistant to give me the uh chart view of the employees by the country.

[00:31:26]Looks like assistant gave me that and I can see that most of my employees are located within United States. Let's open up and expand assistant and ask different question. I am interested in pivot view of the employees and how many employees are located in each country and I see that employees are located in different country with different job categories uh in the pivot view. So I'm not going to go into more detail uh since you've seen many of these functionalities that Z show showed but I'm going to save this as a saved report.

[00:32:07]I can see that my primary and saved report is created and I can toggle between the two. Now when I view my report, I see that salary column is missing a format mask. So let's add a format mask here. Since this is a published report, when I click on edit, a draft version of the report gets created. So my published report can be still viewed by my end users. What I'm editing is just a draft version. And let's add a format mask and preview that draft version. The format mask is applied. So I'm happy with this. And I am going to republish this draft into published one. I want to preserve the saved report that I just saved. So let's keep that and publish.

[00:32:57]When I run the uh format mask is applied and published version is uh still there.

[00:33:03]and uh my saved reports still exist. So all my viewers can see these changes in the public published version. Um so that's a quick overview of what data reporter is. Um data reporter allows editors or business users to quickly create and share their reports without waiting on developers uh writing any SQL query or using page designer. With NL2IR and data reporter, it really empowers users to ask and answer their own questions in with trusted and secure data. We'll do more sessions of data reporter in future office hours. So stay tuned. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Stefan for AI agents and tools.

[00:33:50]Thank you.

[00:33:52]>> Thank you, Christina. It was great. And thank you, Z. I'm going to share my slides here again and then hand it over to Stefan.

[00:33:59]>> Thank you. So, first things first, we have renamed our AI configurations to AI agents to better align with industry standards and terminology. So, wherever you saw AI configurations in Apex 24.2, you will now see the AI agents terminology in Apex 26.1 and beyond. And this is for good reason. Now, a quick recap on AI agents.

[00:34:27]An AI agent is a shared component in your application that defines the behavior and capabilities of an AI assistant.

[00:34:36]Within the agent, you get to choose the AI model. You get to define the system prompt that tells the assistant how it should behave and optionally provide any additional context that should be sent with each request. Once the agent is defined, you can connect it to components like the show AI assistant dynamic action, the generate text with AI dynamic action or page process or use it via our Apex AI PL/SQL APIs. Now, in Apex 26.1, we are very excited to announce a new feature called AI tools.

[00:35:12]And you can think of tools as functions that belong to an AI agent. At runtime, the model will decide whether to call these tools while answering a user's request. And this all happens under the hood.

[00:35:27]This ondemand architecture offers two main benefits. First, enhanced rag because the assistant can fetch exactly the data it needs exactly when it needs it instead of relying only on that initial static context as provided by the developer. Second, and this is the big one, task execution. The assistant can actually do useful things such as look up an order, create a record, update a status, send an email, start a workflow, or whatever other application logic you expose as a tool.

[00:36:02]Now, how this all works? Well, at runtime, Apex shares the available tool definitions with the model. So, the tool name, the tool description, and any tool parameters. The model then decides whether it needs to call one or more tools and if so, Apex executes them. The model then uses the results from those tool calls to either call other tools, maybe even in a loop or produce the final response.

[00:36:30]So instead of just generating text, the assistant can interact with your application in a controlled and declarative way. Now let me show you what that looks like in practice.

[00:36:48]All right. So for the demo, I will be using the customers starter application and I will be acting as a customer success representative and I want to find a reference customer for a case study.

[00:37:06]Before I show that, let me show you how I've changed this application to make this all possible.

[00:37:12]First and foremost, we have an AI service configured at the workspace level. So very basic, I'm using OCI as my AI provider and I have specified here the model and my credentials.

[00:37:27]Then under my application's shared components, I have defined an agent.

[00:37:35]This agent is very simple. It just has a name. It is linked to an AI service. The one from before has a very simple system prompt and three ondemand tools that I have defined. And we're going to look um into them in just a second. Then in page designer, I have here my customers page.

[00:37:56]I should have a button that when clicked just uses showi assistant to let me interact with that agent specified here.

[00:38:08]So it's all quite simple. This is that page. I have my button. I click it. I have my chatbot. Now if I say hello, very simple user prompt. The model comes back with hello. Nothing exciting happened. So although I have these tools and the model is aware of these tools, it didn't need to call them for this specific um user prompt. So no tokens were were wasted there. And I didn't send all of my data up front just in case, right? But what if I say something like this?

[00:38:48]I need a strong cloud reference customer in North America. Which one should I use for my case study?

[00:38:57]Only now is the assistant actually interested in my data. And because I conveniently have a find references, a reference candidates tool, it called that tool to find those customers. And that tool is defined as such. It has a name, it has a description, it has parameters.

[00:39:22]They can be required. They can be optional. They have data types. They have descriptions. Uh there's a lot um and it of course it can it has to have an implementation. So what happens when this tool actually runs? Well, in this case, it's just a SQL query. We execute it and the result set gets sent back to the model.

[00:39:46]So that's why my tool was called with some parameters and I used those the values um the incoming values of those parameters as filters in my query has to only give the model the data that it needs and nothing else.

[00:40:06]So that's good. It um it found a potential customer. I'm going to say I'm happy with that one. So, illuminina Biotech sounds good. Please create an activity, create a meeting. All right.

[00:40:19]What's happening here? I get a um confirmation dialogue. Well, how could my assistant create a meeting? How could a meeting? How could it insert a row in a table? Well, that conveniently happens via this other tool called create customer activity. And let's see how this one is defined. It has a name. It has a description. It has parameters but unlike the first one, this one is implemented as PL/SQL. So something actually happens. We insert a row in a table. We don't just return some data.

[00:40:57]What's more, this particular tool is further uh protected by a so-called user approval so that the end user can actually confirm or cancel uh the invocation of this particular tool. So it's just asking me again does this look good? I say sure and then my tool will actually run. I get also a uh success notification here saying that activity was created. Um so I'm happy. But let me see whether that's actually true. So let's do navigate to customer. So I actually see that u that activity was um was created.

[00:41:43]All right. It just opened a new tab for me on that specific customer and I see that that activity is here. So a meeting for tomorrow with the specified notes.

[00:41:57]Now how did that happen? Well again conveniently I have this navigate to customer tool that unlike the first two it doesn't run in the back end. This one uses front- end JavaScript. So that this tool again using the same infrastructure using uh um parameter values coming from the model is actually run in the browser. So it can run JavaScript, it can use browser APIs and it can do things just a simple example opening a new tab pointing me to some specific um customer.

[00:42:36]So you can imagine the kinds of powerful assistants that you can build given the right tools.

[00:42:44]And that's all I could fit in a few minutes time. But do join me in two weeks time for a full deep dive uh into AI agents and AI tools. And with that I will pass it on to Paige.

[00:42:57]>> Thanks very much Stefan.

[00:42:59]>> Thanks Stefan. Hi everyone. Um, we are very excited to announce that Apex 261 delivers this major UI UX refresh. Uh, make sure I share my screen. Major UI UX refresh across both the builder and applications built with universal theme.

[00:43:17]Let's start with the developer experience first because we gave Builder its first major refresh in years. And right off the bat, we can see that we have moved this vertical to this vertical navigation on the left and that the UI has been refreshed to have better spacing and layouts and bring this redwood aligned look to the builder.

[00:43:40]Along with that, when using Sorry, my technical Okay, there we go. Um, when using the automatic builder theme style, it now recognizes your system UI settings and uses light or dark mode accordingly, but we still have we still have access to setting light or dark mode specifically based on your user preference depending on what you like.

[00:44:07]We've also introduced this builder alert to guide developers towards enabling AI within their builder. So once enabled, this model is available in the builder footer so that developers have access to this information from anywhere in the builder. So while you're doing development, you can know exactly what model you're using and have access to the full AI capabilities within the Apex builder.

[00:44:37]But the goal here wasn't to invent reinvent builder. It was to modernize it while keeping it familiar. And so we've carried that same idea into universal theme.

[00:44:51]Within universal theme, we have introduced this brand new theme style, iris. Now, this is more than just a few tweaks. It contains a number of accessibility improvements, polish defaults, and just like the builder is Redwood aligned. And so let's take a quick look at how this uh new theme style can be adjusted within a theme roller. As I change the pillar color from maybe sky to pine or pine to rose, we can see how the accent colors are adjusted within the UI to match that selected pillar color.

[00:45:39]For the header, we can switch between dark and light or match our pillar color. And we can see how the header color adjusts. And we can do the same thing for navigation, switching between dark, light, and pillar.

[00:45:56]Now, we've also introduced a new version of Font Apex. So, Font Apex 2.5 delivers 66 new icons.

[00:46:07]And this, um, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Font Apex 2.5. Um, but that's not all that we've introduced a number of UI building blocks expanding how we can build rich UI interfaces declaratively.

[00:46:29]So, we don't have time to get into every single thing, but metric card is an example of one of the new template components in two 26.1.

[00:46:39]And this is a template component that is great for presenting data at a glance perhaps in a dashboard with a single key value alongside a label and maybe some supporting details.

[00:46:52]So here's a quick demo of what that metric card looks like in universal theme.

[00:46:59]We also have the flexbox container which allows for custom layouts within uh a single container.

[00:47:10]And we also have new features like template component groups, new page templates, new positions and slots within templates, and lots of customer implemented ideas.

[00:47:22]So with universal theme 26.1, both developers and end users get this more polished, modern experience right out of the box.

[00:47:33]So from the builder to the actual applications, Apex 261 feels much more modern in every layer, in every aspect, and we're really excited for you to try these features out. And with that, I will pass it over to Shaib.

[00:47:52]Right. Thanks, Paige. Hi, everybody. Uh, my name is Shib, and boy, have I been waiting for this day. uh and looking at the number of attendees like wow it seems like uh you've been waiting for this day as well. So this is a great place to transition because the builder UX and the runtime application experience really sit across the entire release. So what a lot of what Paige showed you today is about making the everyday experience of using Apex and building applications uh a little bit better, less friction, uh more polish, more consistency. Uh and that's a good leadin to like final point that I want to make today uh before we close. Uh which is Apex 261 is much broader than just the main themes that we covered today. Uh and a lot of that broader release was shaped directly by the Apex community.

[00:48:37]So today, if I just zoom out a little bit, the session was intentionally focused on these major themes. We talked about Apex Lang and AI agents, AI tools, um natural language support for interactive reports and building your own uh you know reporting uh you know having ad hoc reports, self-service reporting with data reporter. We talked about the refresh UX uh of the builder, universal theme, the new iris theme style. Uh but this is just you know the first glance as you can tell from the size of this release there's a whole lot more that we what we can cover in this single office hour session. So the first session here is really just a starting point. It gives you the big picture. Uh but just to put this into context here's what we touched on today and here is the full release.

[00:49:30]So it gives you a much better sense of the breadth of Apex 261. These are improvements across interactive reports, one of our most loved components, dynamic actions, workflows, the map component like, you know, like a security rest data sources, uh, page center improvements, a template component, administration, and a whole lot more. Uh, many of these are large capabilities that people notice right away. And many of these are very small refinements, the kind of things that you might not need. you might not need to see a full demo, but it will make a big difference in your day-to-day uh use of Apex. Uh and that's an important part of this release. Uh it's not about the big new things, but also reducing friction and all the small little areas that developers spend their time. So when we say there's a whole lot more in this release, uh we really mean it. Uh it's a broad release across the platform. Uh and one of the biggest reasons this release is so broad is also the contributions from the Apex community.

[00:50:22]So this is what I especially want to call out. uh in Apex 261, we've implemented a hundred community ideas.

[00:50:30]That that's from more than 80 contributors. That's a huge number and it's the most community ideas we have ever delivered in a single Apex release.

[00:50:40]Now, to be fair, this is also a little bit of a longer release cycle than uh usual, but even with that context, it's a milestone that we're really proud of.

[00:50:48]And what I like about this number is that it represents real feedback from real people building real applications.

[00:50:54]These are ideas from developers, from administrators, from partners and customers and community members that have been using Apex uh for a long time.

[00:51:01]They might have been new to Apex, but they're using it in real practical real world solutions uh real world scenarios uh and then taking the time to tell us what where do you think the product can be made better. So when you look at the actual ideas, it's amazing how wide ranging that community feedback really was. So this slide is intentionally dense. Uh because the point is not for everybody to read every uh you know bullet on here. You can look at the release notes and see uh all the different changes in this release. Uh the point is is to show the scale. These ideas span different parts of Apex from the builder to the runtime uh favorite components, different reporting components. uh you know how you interact with the page, how you uh process workflow. Uh so some of these again are very highly visible, some of them are very specific and it's a kind of thing that where if it affects your daily work, it really matters to you. Uh and that's why this community feedback is so important. Uh you know the community sees Apex from every angle. uh people are building internal applications, customerf facing applications, departmental applications, enterprise systems, reporting tools, mobile friendly PWAs, uh integrations, everything in between. And so that variety really helps us find all the rough edges. Um this is from 80 plus contributors. So these are the people that took the time to write up an idea, explain a use case, vote and comment and clarify what they needed uh and really help us understand why something mattered. Uh and that matters because good product feedback is work.

[00:52:33]It takes time to describe the problem clearly, share the context and really help us understand uh the impact of what what you're trying to do. Uh so what I really want to say here is a big thank you to everyone in the community that that spent their time that that shared this feedback with us. Uh again it's I know this is coming from people that are building real applications uh and you're trying to make the product better for everyone and that's what you see reflected uh in Apex 261. So again thank you for taking the time and the energy and the care you take into sharing these ideas with us. Uh, Apex 261 is generally available now. So, please try it, explore it, see the what's new page. Uh, and join us for the upcoming office hour uh, session deep dives that we'll have in the next several weeks. Uh, but most importantly, keep that feedback coming.

[00:53:19]Uh, keep submitting ideas, keep commenting, keep voting, and keep telling us where we can do better. We're really excited to see what you build with Apex 261. And with that, I'll pass it back to you, Mark.

[00:53:31]>> All right. Thank you, Shakib.

[00:53:33]All right. Then in closing, just to kind of go over the announcements today. So 26.1 uh was released today. It's available for download on OTN. You can go to oracle.com/apex. Go to our download page. Uh you can try out Apex26.1 today on oracle.com, our public evaluation instance. If you have a workspace there, you can sign right in.

[00:53:55]If you don't have a workspace, you're welcome to sign up for a free new workspace there. A roll out on cloud, OCI, and multicloud will begin in the coming weeks. And include the links here to our new features page, aer.com/apex/ what's new. I'm sure there was also shared in chat somewhere. And then uh for documentation and videos and blogs and everything else, go to oracle.com/apex.

[00:54:21]So, thank you all for being here uh and and thank you all for being uh patient with us. Ask keeper saying the release took a little bit longer. Uh but yeah, it's finally out and I'm excited to to hear from all of you uh how you kind of get on with Apex and and and 261 and and uh you start using Apex Lang. So, thank you all and uh we will pick it up again next Thursday. Uh you can go to the office hours homepage, look up the agenda. Uh but your next office hours uh will be next Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern again. So, thank you all and see you next week.