I actually got started in IT after spending a few years working in banking. I wanted to try something different, so I went to university to get a degree in Business Administration. At university, I moved focus more and more towards IT and database topics. After university, in 2001, I joined Oracle in Germany as a Pre-Sales Consultant. It was a great chance to work with customers and partners on all kinds of database-centric application development projects. Back then, XML databases were the big thing, and Oracle had just added XML support to its database. I dove into that, and all other kinds of topics, like Oracle Spatial or Oracle Text, and worked with customers to build cool solutions. It was a fantastic way to learn, especially when someone would ask, "Why doesn’t this SQL work, can you help?" I also got involved with the German Oracle Users Group (DOAG), and I haven't missed a single conference since 2002.
When APEX came out, with Oracle Database 10g in 2004, (as "HTML DB"), our then pre-sales director, Günther Stürner, asked me to check it out. We started showing it to customers and at user group meetings, and people got really excited—they started building apps everywhere! We did one-day workshops at all the Oracle offices across Germany. In 2005, we came up with the idea to start a German-language APEX community website as part of Oracle Germany's website, and there we posted new how-to articles every two weeks. That really helped get the German APEX community off the ground, and there was always something happening: workshops, projects, presentations, and lots of teamwork.
Fast forward to 2016, and I had the chance to join the APEX team: So, after 15 years in pre-sales, I moved over to development. Having worked with so many customers, I had plenty of ideas for new features, and one of the first things I worked on was Web Source Modules, which are now called REST Data Sources. It was the first major APEX feature I got to help shape. Since then, I've focused on the server-side of APEX and worked on many things in APEX: Examples are Data Loading, the Map Region, or Faceted Search.
I still love presenting at conferences and discussing real-world challenges with partners and customers. There's a lot ahead: making sure APEX is ready for the AI era, supporting all the new features in Oracle AI Database 26ai (like Duality Views), helping the platform evolve, and, of course, staying connected with the community.
Carsten Czarski, Architect.