Installing Oracle XE (older) AFTER installing APEX 10g?

Question

Awhile back I installed the Oracle 10g XE database on my dev machine. Since then, I installed Application Express over top of the XE installation. In other words, it's APEX running on 10g. I found I don't really need APEX after all (it's turned out I'm developing in ASP.NET and Oracle instead), and I recall having more of a GUI to manage the XE 10g instance BEFORE I installed APEX.

Can I remove APEX while leaving my original XE installation? I tried to re-install the original XE, but I didn't see a way of doing this without installing a new HOME (which I'd rather not do; it confuses me). TIA.

Answer 1

Oracle XE comes with APEX installed, along with a ( from memory ) APEX based XE management tool. What it sounds like you actually did was was upgrade/over install a newer version of APEX, then remove APEX all together.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to backup your user schema's using exp or expdp ( data pump ) , uninstall XE, reinstall XE and then import your user schema's. This will get XE back to how you want it.

Answer 2

There's a bunch of stuff (such as the PL/SQL embedded gateway) that is there irrespective of what you did. You also get a bunch of stuff under the FLOWS_020100 (I think).

What happens when you install, for example, Apex 3.2 on XE is that it creates a new schema (FLOWS_030200 or APEX_0400000 or whatever), and repoints a bunch of synonyms from FLOWS_020100 to the new schema.

Sometimes (because of the space restrictions in XE) you drop the FLOWS_020100 schema. If so, your best bet is probably to copy out anything in the database you need, un-install XE and reinstall it. If you still have the old schema, you can have a go at following the 'reverting' instructions as you would for a failed upgrade.

Answer 3

AFAIK Apex installs web server and some scripts into the database. Your gui to manage xe should change, though. Are you sure you are accessing the same port?

Also, there is SqlDeveloper, quite good tool for oracle databases.

Finally, have you tried oracle ADF for application development?