Oracle APEX 23.2 certification — how different is it from earlier versions?
I've been an APEX developer for about 4 years but only started thinking about the certification recently. Most of my experience is on versions 20.x and 21.x. My company just migrated to 23.2 and my manager is pushing for me to get certified before Q3. I'm looking at roughly 10 weeks to prepare while handling a full project load.
The exam guide lists Universal Theme customization, REST-enabled SQL, and Progressive Web App features as heavily weighted areas. I feel okay on REST and Universal Theme but the PWA stuff is newer to me. In practice I've mostly built internal tools where PWA functionality wasn't a priority, so there's a real gap there. Anyone know roughly what percentage of questions touch on PWA versus more traditional APEX development patterns?
I've been doing about 75 practice questions a day from the Oracle University question bank. My scores are hovering around 68 to 72%, and I've read you want to be consistently hitting 80%+ on practice before attempting the real thing. Not quite there yet, especially on the APEX Automation and Dynamic Actions sections.
10 weeks with a full project load is tight but doable if you're disciplined. I'd cut the daily practice questions and spend more focused time in the actual APEX builder doing Oracle LiveLabs exercises. Hands-on beats passive review for this cert.
Dynamic Actions tripped me up more than anything else. The order of execution and how DA firing points interact with page load events has some non-obvious behavior. Make sure you're testing scenarios in a sandbox rather than just reading about them.
What's your background with APEX Automation? That feature was added in 21.1 and a lot of developers who came up before that version have a real gap there. It's worth spending a focused week on it specifically rather than treating it as part of general review.
The PWA section was maybe 10 to 12% of what I saw on my exam, but that could vary. The bigger gotcha for experienced devs is the security questions around session state protection and authentication schemes — stuff you use every day but might not have thought about from a conceptual standpoint.