Hello, welcome to Oracle APEX Foundations course, Getting Started With Oracle APEX module, Provisioning an APEX Workspace lesson. My name is Chaitanya, I am a product manager on the Oracle APEX Product Development team. So, now that you have an understanding of what Oracle APEX is, APEX availability, and architecture, and you also learned what are the use cases of Oracle APEX, you must be excited to get started with building applications using Oracle APEX. Let's go ahead and learn how to provision an APEX Workspace, and get started with building applications. In this lesson, you'll learn about different options to get started for free with Oracle APEX. First, you learn how to sign up for an Always Free APEX service, you'll learn how to create an APEX Service Instance, and then you'll learn how to provision an APEX Workspace to get started with your application development.

In this lesson, you also learn how to sign up for a Free Workspace on the customer evaluation-only instance, apex.oracle.com. You have different options to get started for free with Oracle APEX. You can get an Always Free APEX Service. The APEX Application Development Service or APEX Service provides a preconfigured, fully managed, and secured environment in Oracle Cloud to build and deploy world class applications. Once you sign up for your free tier account, you can easily create an APEX service that is free for an unlimited time, or you can spend your free cloud credits on your full scalable APEX service. Another option to get started with APEX is to request a free workspace on apex.oracle.com. It just takes a few moments to sign up, and within minutes you will have your workspace up and ready to start building your first APEX application. You can also get started with APEX by downloading and installing APEX locally. You can download and install APEX into any edition of Oracle database.

You can get complete instructions in the APEX installation guard. Additionally, the free Oracle Database Express Edition XE can be used to run APEX locally. APEX runs anywhere that Oracle database runs, whether it is on-premises, Oracle cloud, or anywhere else. Now, let's look at some additional ways you can get started with. You can use APEX on autonomous database. Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud comes with APEX ready to go. You can use APEX on any of the Autonomous Database workload types. Because the underlying database is autonomous, you as a developer, are free from many management tasks. An Always Free version of Autonomous Database provides everything available in always free APEX service, plus the ability to connect SQL clients and non-APEX applications to your database via Oracle Net Services. You can install APEX on other Oracle Cloud services. It's easy to download and install APEX into other Oracle Cloud services, including Database Cloud Service and XML Data Cloud Service. You can even install into an Oracle Cloud VM. Note that the primary environment in these codes is APEX Service. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free workspace on apex.oracle.com.

Now, let's explore how to get started with APEX using the Always Free APEX Service. APEX Service supports APEX applications and corresponding Oracle REST Data Services endpoints. APEX Service also comes with development tools such as Database Actions. Before you begin using APEX Service, you must have an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure(OCI) account with access to an OCI tenancy. Now, how do you sign up for an Oracle Cloud free tier? To sign up for an Oracle Cloud free tier account, go to oracle.com/cloud/free. And now it's demo time. Let's watch how to sign up and get started with an Always Free APEX Service. Assuming that you already have your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account set up, go to cloud.oracle.com and log into your OCI tenancy. On the OCI Console homepage, you see a hamburger icon next to Oracle Cloud. Click the hamburger icon, scroll down a bit, and you see Developer Services.

Then you see APEX Application Development and APEX Instances. Let's click 'APEX Application Development'. You want to create an APEX service. So, let's first select a compartment, and after selecting compartment, click 'Create APEX Service'. You can provide some basic information for the APEX Service, for example, enter a user friendly name for the display name and enter a database name. Scroll down a bit. And then make sure you turn on the Always Free option here. Scroll down further. Enter password for admin username and also the same for confirm password. Click 'Create APEX Service'. On the Instance details page, you first see provisioning in orange. Once APEX instance is available, it shows Available here, and it turns into green, and then you also see the Launch APEX and Launch Database actions buttons enabled. And now you see the APEX instance is available. You can click 'Launch APEX' to launch APEX Administration Services from here. Before you get started with building applications in your new APEX Service, you must first set up an initial APEX Workspace.

An APEX Workspace enables multiple users to work within the same APEX installation while keeping their objects, data, and applications private. Each workspace has a unique numeric ID and name. Now, let's watch how to provision an APEX Workspace. Now, after you see that the APEX Instance is available, click 'Launch APEX'. This takes you to the APEX Instance Administration Services page. Enter a password, click 'Sign Into Administration'. Now, you need to create a workspace, so click 'Create Workspace'. You can choose between creating a new schema or use an existing schema to associate your workspace with. If you are just getting started, choose the new schema option. In this case let's click 'New Schema', enter a workspace name, enter a workspace username, and then a password for the workspace username. You can then click 'Create Workspace'. The workspace is now created for you. Now, you can click the 'Workspace Name' here, and that takes you to the workspace login page.

So, enter your workspace username and password, and then click 'Sign In'. The workspace homepage appears. Now, let's explore the next option to get started for free with APEX. Sign up for a free workspace on apex.oracle.com. Navigate to your browser, go to apex.oracle.com, and then click 'Sign In'. On the sign in page, you see a request a workspace link, click 'Request a Workspace'. Fill in the details and follow the instructions in the wizard to get a free workspace on apex.oracle.com. This lesson covered different options that are available to get started for free with Oracle APEX. You learned how to sign up for an Always Free APEX Service and then create an APEX Service Instance, and finally, provision an APEX Workspace. This lesson also covered how to sign up for a Free Workspace on the customer evaluation only instance, apex.oracle.com. This concludes the Provisioning an APEX Workspace lesson. I hope you find that useful. Thank you for watching.