Chris Jones (of Oracle) has a new post to his OTN blog with a look at tracing in Oracle+PHP applications via some new methods added to the OCI8 extension.

No matter how it was installed, the PHP OCI8 extension provides a procedural API with familiar calls allowing efficient SQL and PL/SQL execution. The extension also supports some advanced Oracle features such as connection pooling. Recently some new OCI8 functions were checked into the PHP source code.

The new functions - oci_set_module_name, oci_set_action and oci_set_client_info - can be used on any existing (or new) Oracle connection to provide a bit more information about what's going on inside. You can get access to this information via the data dictionary views or through the SYS_CONTEXT() function in your SQL statements.

Chris Jones has officially launched the latest OCI8 (Oracle) drivers for PHP - version 1.4.0 Alpha:

I just released an Alpha version of PECL OCI8 1.4 on http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 The code is also merged to what will eventually be the PHP 5.3.2 and PHP 6.0 releases. Documentation will appear on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php in the next few days, if all goes according to plan.

Updates in this alpha release include a few new connection attribute functions, a change in the driver name for 11gRD2 connections and a correction of a bug in the oci_bind_by_name error handling.

In this new post to his blog about the release of a new version of the OCI8 PECL extension - 1.3.5.

Last week Christopher Jones from Oracle pinged me about a patch I submitted a while back. The patch enables basic Oracle Instant Client detection during configure stage. The patch was meant to simplify install/upgrade of Pecl OCI8 module. After a number of revisions and improvements we have a working test version that will become OCI8 1.3.5.

You can find some details about the new release you can find more details on Chris Jones' blog in a few entries

It's been 12 years since the first Oracle PHP extension was committed and Chris Jones takes a brief look back in his latest blog post.

The oracle.c and oracle.h files for the "oracle" PHP extension were checked into the php/fi 2.0 source code by Stig Bakken on this day in 1997.

Chris mentions the directions the extension has headed, when "oci8" became the standard over "oracle" and the PDO driver/extension. You can find more on using PHP & Oracle in the Underground Manual and the PHP Developer Center on the Oracle Technology Network.

Chris Jones has a recommendation for those compiling Oracle support into PHP - there's a simple way to reduce the amount of disk space that your Instant Client install uses - a "only what's needed" setup.

Most PHP OCI8 users link PHP with the Oracle Instant Client (IC) libraries that handle the underlying "client" (i.e PHP OCI8 extension) communication with the database. IC is relatively small for the features it gives, and is very easy to install. A ZIP or RPM download unpacks a few libraries. [...] Although IC isn't particularly big - and it's getting relatively smaller all the time - there are two ways to reduce its size.

His two recommendations are to use the lite client version instead of the full-blown one (only has common character sets) or you can just remove the JDBC/ODBC/OCCI libraries from the full install. He lists out the files that are actually needed by the OCI8 extension to compile correctly.

Chris Jones has written up a guide for getting the Oracle Instant Client and PHP up and working on Linux and Windows.

Oracle 11g Instant Client is the easiest way to connect PHP to a remote Oracle database. This notes describes how to install PHP with the OCI8 Extension and Oracle Instant Client on Windows and Linux. The free The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual contains more detail and explains other installation options.

The guide walks you through enabling the PHP OCI8 Extension on Windows/Linux, verifying that its correctly installed and making a sample request to the remote Oracle database.

In this new entry to his Oracle blog Chris Jones explains some of the prompts you're given when you go to install the latest OCI8 drivers for PHP.

There's two versions - the short one that runs through a basic install, grabbing the package and change up your config and the other that talks about how to pull down and configure a certain version of the need comes up.

You can find out more about this updated package on its PECL page and the Changelog for anything more specific.

Just for those PHP & Oracle users out there Chris Jones has posted a new entry to his Oracle blog detailing the different ways you can compile with oci8 support.

PHP OCI8 can be built using libraries from a full Oracle Database (or Database "Client") install, created from running the GUI installer. This is often referred to as an "ORACLE_HOME" install, since an environment variable of that name is set to the installed Oracle software directory. [...] Another dimension to the install is that PHP extensions can be statically compiled into the PHP executable(s), or built as shared binaries. If OCI8 is built as a shared library it is loaded into PHP as a result of setting the php.ini option "extension=oci8.so".

There's eight different methods he mentions including building it as a shared module, using the normal Oracle libraries to build and using the Instant Client libraries to run the build.

With the release of another DLL driver for PHP on Windows to access Oracle databases, Chris Jones wanted to alleviate any confusion there might be between the two in a new blog post.

As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive versions of the OCI8 extension DLL [...] The two DLLs have the same user script API that do the same thing. You only need to (and only can) enable one at any one time. Choose the one that matches your Oracle client libraries.

The two DLLs - php_oci8.dll and php_oci8_11h.dll - have pretty self-explanitory names, but it could be confusing as to whether you need both or not if you go the 11g route.

In this new post to his blog Chris Jones looks at an option to increase the performance of your PHP/Oracle application even more - converting a REF CURSOR into a piped data set via the PDO_OCI extension.

REF CURSORs are common in Oracle's stored procedural language PL/SQL. They let you pass around a pointer to a set of query results. However in PHP, PDO_OCI doesn't yet allow fetching from them. [...] One workaround, when you can't rewrite the PL/SQL code to do a normal query, is to write a wrapper function that pipes the output.

He includes an example, creating an example myproc() that contains the query to select the last names of all employees in the table. This procedure is put inside of a package so it can be called directly in the SQL statement and the ref cursor can be automatically piped to output.