APEX 503 – Service Unavailable – And you don’t know the APEX_PUBLIC_USER Password

It’s probably Monday morning. The caffeine from your first cup of coffee has not quite worked it’s way into your system.
The cold sweat running down the back of your neck provides an unpleasant contrast to the warm blast of panicked users as they call up to inform you that the Application is down.
APEX, which has been behaving impeccibly all this time, has suddenly decided to respond to all requests with :

503 – Service Unavailable.

The database is up. The APEX Listener is up. But something else is up. APEX just doesn’t want to play.
Better still, the person who set up the APEX in the first place has long-departed the company. You have no idea how the Apex Listener was configured.

Out of sympathy with your current predicament, what follows is :

• How to confirm that this problem is related to the APEX_PUBLIC_USER (the most likely cause)
• A quick and fairly dirty way of getting things back up and running again
• How to stop this happening again

Note: These steps were tested Oracle Developer Day VM with a 12c database running on Oracle Linux 6.5. In this environment, APEX is configured to run with the APEX Listener.

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Mama Mia ! Oracle Database Password Complexity and Seventies Euro-Pop

Recently, Deb got tickets for us to go to an outdoor cinema.
“It’ll be lovely”, she said, “we can have a picnic on a warm summer’s evening whilst watching a film”.
“Sounds good”, I said, trying hard to overlook the fact that, in England, a summer’s evening is as likely to be wet as it is to be warm.
Fortunately the weather held, the picnic was delicious and the company, needless to say, was divine.
As for the film…”I can’t believe that you’ve never seen Mama Mia before”, exclaimed my better half.
Some intensive negotiations followed on the subject of Brownie Points. As a result, my late Saturday evenings for the next three months will definitely include watching Match of the Day. Yes, I will get to watch A Man After Midnight.