On his blog today, Christopher Jones mentions some updates that are going to be included in upcoming PHP versions as pertains to the Oracle functionality that comes bundled in.

What is happening with PHP 5 is that some bigger enhancements will be merged into a planned PHP 5.3 release. [...] Even if you are still using PHP 4, or PHP 5.1, any testing you do on 5.2.4 right now will benefit you when you get around to upgrading. PHP 5.2.4 includes OCI8 (and PDO_OCI) of course, as the code base is picked up from PHP's CVS system.

There's also a list included of bugs that have been fixed in this latest version of the PECL OCI8 connectivity including a problem with a memory limit, a segfault issue when rebinding a re-executing a statement with LOB and an allowance for the statement cache size for non-persistent connections.