Harun Yayli came across a slight problem in his development using the oci_bind_by_name function for one of his queries:

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.

Christopher Jones has a quick post pointing out a new PHP and Oracle-related book from McGraw-Hill (written by Lee Barney and Michael McLaughlin covering web development with Oracle, PHP and Ajax:

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.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions podcast series - a talk from Christopher Jones on performance in Oracle.

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 the Oracle users out there looking for an easy way to pull those tags together and make a handy little cloud out of them, Maggie Nelson has posted about a simple Oracle function that can help - NTILE.

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).

Christopher Jones has pointed out a new whitepaper that's been published by oracle about the scalability the connection pooling affords for current versions of PHP.

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.

Christopher Jones has posted about the latest Instant Client release for the Intel chips running OS X:

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

Christopher Jones has posted an announcement about the latest release of the PECL OCI8 package (version 1.3.2 Beta) hitting the streets:

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

Christopher Jones has pointed out a new customer interview that was done covering PHP and the connection pooling in Oracle 11g for Oracle Magazine.

Oracle Magazine's May/June 2008 issue contains a "Developer Nation" article. In it, David Kelly interviews Levi Dixon from Community Connect about using PHP and Oracle.

The article references the Oracle/PHP "strange combination" that used to exist and how it's evolved into a vital, living part of Oracle's stack (like with the OCI8 extension).

A little while back Matthew Turland posted an interesting item to has blog talking about what he calls the "odd triangle" of PHP, MySQL and Oracle.

In [an article from Maggie Nelson in a blog entry], she remarks on the article being MySQL-oriented and how limited MySQL explain plan support is compared to Oracle. I've had some thoughts in my head for a while that are related to these points, so I finally decided to, knock on wood, put pen to paper.

Matthew talks about things he agrees with (Oracle over MySQL when it comes to hierarchal data and set operators) and some of the things that can make Oracle, with all its power, fall by the wayside. This includes its licensing, the administration costs and some of the recent developments between Sun and MySQL.

Christopher Jones has posted a script to his blog today giving an example of how you can use the Spatial functionality of Oracle in a PHP application:

Oracle Spatial is a powerful library for adding location awareness to applications. This script uses the core subset of Spatial, called Oracle Locator, which is included in all Oracle Database editions.

His example connects to the database resource and makes a few example SQL queries: one that uses the sod_nn() function built in to the Spatial package to grab the store locations close to the customers, another that finds the latitude and longitude for a customer's information and a method for querying an object collection of locations in a given area.