As expected, DB-centric sessions have the early running with most interest. However if you want to see PHP more prominent at the conference, a couple of PHP sessions have registered: Internet Information Server and Oracle and Ignite Your Oracle and PHP Experience with CodeIgniter

You can find out more about these and other great talks (and complete conference information) on the Open World website.

HP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

You can find out more about the package and download this latest edition from its PECL page or check out the whitepaper they recent;y wrote up about PHP and Oracle scalability.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapeco on June 20." [...] He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

The schedule for the event can be found here with details on which talks will be given when (including Elton's at 8am on the 21st.

Published in August 2007, Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional weighs in at a hefty 763 pages long. It's one for the bookshelf, not for the backpack thats for sure!

He goes through the sections of the book - the PHP intro, some of its "Enterprise thinking", mentions of MySQL and SQLite and, of course, the large amount of Oracle content (both in using Oracle alone and in connecting the two together).

If you're in the market for a book to perhaps learn PHP and would like to move onto advanced concepts later on, this book is worth a look. If you’re an experienced PHP developer and looking for an introduction into the world of Oracle, this is the book for you.

Israeli startup Zend Technologies has fired 25 percent of its R&D team (at least ten people), as well as others across the company, in an attempt to become cash flow positive, says a source close to the company.

The official Zend word is that yes, there have been layoffs but no, they cannot comment on the reasoning behind them. Several big names are being thrown around for possible buyers - Microsoft, IBM and Oracle - who have all shown interest in the past.

If you think that the maxlength parameter in the documentation of oci_bind_by_name is optional, see this example and think again.

His sample code gave him a "can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column..." error from his Oracle database. His fix was to add that length parameter (his max column length) and all was well. One of his comments (from cj) helps to explain things a bit more:

It makes senses that a length would be required because when the oci_bind_by_name() call is made, there is no data in $$key (a.k.a. $a, $b or $c). Without a length passed, PHP tells the DB to expect a single byte string.

The prolific Michael McLauglin just sent me a copy of his other new book "Oracle Database AJAX & PHP Web Application Development", co-written with Lee Barney.

The book looks at how to build "faster, lighter and more responsive Web applications while reducing code support and creation time". There's chapters on scalability, the basics of Ajax, PDO and multimodel communications.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Christopher Jones present "Performance Tuning for PHP with Oracle Databases".

You can get at it three different ways - either through just downloading the mp3, using the in page player or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great recorded sessions from last year's ZendCon.

For example, check out the documentation for the NTILE Function. Yeah, sounds kind of boring. What good could it be in the wonderful world of web development? After all, who manages employee or sales tables anymore... Answer: generating tag clouds.

Her SQL statement categorizes the tags for you automatically, dropping them in to "buckets" of font sizes. This makes it simple to loop through them (like with a foreach) and output your tags with a little help from some CSS. You can even specify how many buckets you want it to fill (how many different tag values to get and compare).

The whitepaper talks about the changes in the PHP OCI8 1.3 extension, explains some of the concepts behind DRCP and FAN, and gives best practices and tuning tips. It includes a new PHP benchmark which shows up to 20,000 connections being handled by Oracle on commodity hardware using only 2G RAM.

The paper also talks about the FAN support that's built in - the ability for PHP to use the Oracle RAC cluster functionality to make for high availability (switching between nodes). The latest beta with all of this functionality in it can be grabbed from its page on the PECL site.