I'm just starting an installation of Oracle APEX 3.1.1 into one of our development ebs instances for 2 reasons.

1. To provide a small applet to a project team
2. To provide the infrastructure for the dbas to write their own little applets.

I chose this method for the following reasons (unordered)

• it's fairly cool
• we know pl/sql much better than java
• we don't much like forms.
• you can integrate really easily.
• deployment is pretty simple.

Those of you that have installed apex frequently will know it's a pretty quick install on decent hardware. So the following came as rather a surprise.

timing for: English Dictionary
Elapsed: 00:03:16.71
-- Updating user account expiration. -------
timing for: Upgrade
Elapsed: 00:00:00.43
...End of install if runtime install
...create null.sql
timing for: Development Installation
Elapsed: 01:03:48.57

That's right over an hour. The reason for this is that with 3.1.1 APEX calls DBMS_STATS.GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS('APEX'); this spend almost 55 minutes performing inappropriate index lookups on the data dictionary for us. This might be solvable, though to be honest it's probably not worth it, but just a heads-up really, the APEX install may take longer than you think in a large environment and with the latest version of the software.