I’ve had quite a few discussions with people regarding whether APEX running inside the database is a good thing or a bad thing. Personally I believe it is definitely a good thing, I see no downsides really. However a recent forum thread

For me, the fact that APEX runs inside the database means that one of the major positives is you are able to take full advantage of each and every database available to you. A recent forum thread illustrates this very nicely. The poster in the thread has deleted some files and has unfortunately performed a commit before realising their mistake.

Here is where the features of the database can help you, for example we are able to take advantage of the Flashback feature to get the database back to the state it was in before the files were deleted.

The user in the forum deleted some files from…