In a new post, Christopher Jones talks about some difficulty a friend of his was having with returning a connection type from Oracle back to a script. In his case, it was a Ruby script and, unfortunately, there's no direct support for it. So, Christopher jumped in to help out.

PHP's oci8 extension oci_bind_array_by_name() can bind collections but there is no equivalent in ruby-oci8.

Justin outlines a solution on his blog Ruby: Invoking a PL/SQL Package with Array args. His example relies on some company infrastructure so I came up with this standalone example. This first SQL*Plus script sets up the scenario.

Stick with me on this one - there's some PHP right there at the end. He shows how much simpler the same kind of operation would be in PHP thanks to the oci_bind_array_by_name functionality understanding the return value. What took about 20 lines for just the Ruby code to handle the result correctly takes only five in PHP.