Today, we are pleased to announce immediate general availability of Oracle APEX AI Application Generator 26.2 on premises. APEX 26.2 availability on Oracle Autonomous AI Database will follow shortly. This release provides more granular APEXlang deployment capabilities, advances AI Agents and AI Interactive Reports, introduces integration with Oracle Deep Data Security, and makes it easier for applications to securely access OCI services using managed identities. Alongside these headline capabilities, APEX 26.2 also includes enhancements across workflows, Universal Theme, charts, administration, and platform APIs.
Faster, More Collaborative Development with APEXlang
APEX 26.1 introduced APEXlang, an open, human-readable application definition language that brings APEX applications into source-driven development workflows. APEX 26.2 takes the next step with file-level import. Developers can now edit an individual page or shared component as an .apx file and import only that change, rather than redeploying the entire application. This can help shorten the edit-import-test cycle, limit the scope of each update, and support parallel development and troubleshooting.
Developers can import individual files directly from Oracle SQL Developer for VS Code or use Oracle SQLcl to import one or more selected files. Combined with the ability to compare and pull changes before importing, teams can reconcile changes made in App Builder and external development environments while helping reduce the risk of unintended overwrites.
APEXlang now also preserves translations and Working Copy metadata, supports subscription mapping across workspaces, and is backed by new PL/SQL APIs for application locking and Working Copies. Together, these make APEXlang a foundation for source control, CI/CD, and AI-assisted development.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
AI Services and AI Agents: More Capable, More Controllable
APEX 26.2 evolves the AI capabilities introduced in previous releases with support for the latest generation of provider APIs and greater control over how AI Agents reason. Generative AI Services now support OpenAI Responses and compatible APIs, Google Gemini Interactions, and supported Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI models. Developers select the Provider API while APEX handles the corresponding endpoints and request and response formats, allowing applications to take advantage of newer provider capabilities through the same APEX AI components and PL/SQL APIs.
New Reasoning Effort controls let developers determine how much reasoning a supported model should apply to a task. An agent handling a straightforward request can use a lower effort to potentially reduce response time and token usage, while more complex tasks can use a higher effort when appropriate. Reasoning effort can be configured for an AI Agent or adjusted programmatically for individual requests.
AI Agents can also provide navigation to application pages, enabling an answer to take users directly to a relevant report, form, or detail page. Developers define the destinations and parameters the agent may use, while trusted application code constructs the final APEX URL and checksum, keeping session-specific URL information out of model messages.
Together, these capabilities give developers more flexibility over which AI services they use, how agents reason, and how AI becomes part of the application experience.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
A Smarter, More Modern Interactive Reports Experience
APEX 26.2 also delivers a major update to Interactive Reports, with improvements to both the traditional reporting experience and the AI-powered capabilities introduced in APEX 26.1. The report interface has been modernized with refreshed styling, clearer layouts, improved responsive behavior, multi-select filters, better numeric and date filtering, drag-and-drop column ordering, and improved chart, pivot, and grouping workflows. Existing saved reports, subscriptions, downloads, and report management capabilities are supported.
AI Interactive Reports can support common everyday tasks. Common commands such as filtering, sorting, showing or hiding columns, creating control breaks, and resetting a report can now be handled through configurable key phraseswithout requiring AI interpretation. More complex or ambiguous requests continue to be handled through the AI experience.
And users can now create computed columns with natural language. A request such as “Create Weighted Pipeline as Amount times Probability divided by 100” becomes a standard Interactive Report computation that users can review, edit, save, or remove, all without changing the underlying SQL query or data source. The result is a reporting experience that combines the predictable and transparent benhavior of Interactive Reports with the convenience of a natural language interface.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
Bring Data Security Closer to the Data
As applications expose data through more experiences, from reports and forms to background processes and AI Agents, maintaining the same authorization logic across every access path can become increasingly complex.
APEX 26.2 introduces integration with Oracle Deep Data Security in Oracle AI Database, enabling fine-grained data authorization to be enforced where the data resides.
APEX passes verified end-user and application identities to the database. The database establishes an end-user security context and applies declarative Data Roles and Data Grants to SQL execution. These policies can control access at the row, column, and individual value level based on the authenticated user and their roles.
This complements rather than replaces APEX authorization. APEX authorization determines what a user can access or do in the application; Deep Data Security determines what data SQL is allowed to read or change.
That distinction becomes particularly valuable with AI. SQL executed by supported APEX AI Agent tools runs under the requesting user’s security context, so asking an agent for more data does not itself grant additional access, the database Data Grant still determines what the request can retrieve.
Access to OCI Services with Managed Identities
APEX 26.2 also simplifies how applications authenticate to OCI services.
APEX Web Credentials can now reference DBMS_CLOUD credentials using OCI Native Authentication, including Resource Principal and Database Tools Identity. This enables APEX applications to access services such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI without storing an individual user’s API private key in an APEX Web Credential.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management continues to determine what resources the managed identity can access, while the database manages the credential used by APEX. For Autonomous Database Resource Principal, OCI also manages the underlying credentials and their rotation.
This provides a simpler model for applications that need to consume OCI services while keeping identity and access management centralized.
Read the technical blog to learn more.
Additional Platform Enhancements
APEX 26.2 includes many additional enhancements across the platform.
Workflow improvements make it easier to model evolving business processes, including Draft activities, custom outcomes for Action Tasks, workflow instance migration, and diagram export. Universal Theme 26.2 brings additional visual and usability enhancements, while charts gain performance and accessibility improvements.
The release also includes new application and Working Copy APIs, APEXlang static analysis with Oracle SQLcl CodeScan, improved Human Task error handling, enhanced Mail Queue reporting, stronger network access controls, and expanded PL/SQL and JavaScript APIs.
Explore What’s New in APEX 26.2. For the full list of enhancements, see the Oracle APEX 26.2 release notes.
Get Started
Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, modernizing enterprise workflows, integrating with Oracle Cloud services, or bringing professional development practices to APEX with APEXlang, APEX 26.2 gives teams new ways to build and evolve applications with greater flexibility and control over application architecture and data access.
Oracle APEX 26.2 is available today for on-premises deployment, with OCI and multi-cloud rollout to follow in the coming weeks.
Try Oracle APEX 26.2 for free at oracleapex.com. Full documentation, newsletter, release notes, videos, and feature deep dives are also available at oracle.com/apex.