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.

Christopher Jones has a (very) quick announcement about the latest builds of the PHP RPMs for Enterprise linux installations:

PHP 5.2.5 RPMs for x86 Enterprise Linux (i.e. RHEL) 4.6 and 5.1 are on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These are supplied "as is".

The RPMs are part of a project to provide support for Oracle Enterprise Linux servers (as well as Red Hat installs) and provide a PHP command line, CGI interface and an Apache module quickly and easily. Check out the project page to find out more and to grab this latest build.

Christopher Jones has a (very) quick announcement about the latest builds of the PHP RPMs for Enterprise linux installations:

PHP 5.2.5 RPMs for x86 Enterprise Linux (i.e. RHEL) 4.6 and 5.1 are on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These are supplied "as is".

The RPMs are part of a project to provide support for Oracle Enterprise Linux servers (as well as Red Hat installs) and provide a PHP command line, CGI interface and an Apache module quickly and easily. Check out the project page to find out more and to grab this latest build.

Both Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway have pointed out some new PHP RPMs for Oracle with improved PDO_OCI and OCI8 functionality.

Good news everyone. We've just released a set of RPMs for PHP which include OCI8 and the Oracle PDO driver, as well as many other PHP extensions. These are for development testing only, as Oracle doesn't support them. The RPMs are based on PHP 5.2.3.

You can grab these latest RPMs from the oss.oracle.com website and to install them, follow the steps outlined on Alison's blog.

Both Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway have pointed out some new PHP RPMs for Oracle with improved PDO_OCI and OCI8 functionality.

Good news everyone. We've just released a set of RPMs for PHP which include OCI8 and the Oracle PDO driver, as well as many other PHP extensions. These are for development testing only, as Oracle doesn't support them. The RPMs are based on PHP 5.2.3.

You can grab these latest RPMs from the oss.oracle.com website and to install them, follow the steps outlined on Alison's blog.

After struggling with it for a good while, Maggie Nelson finally figured out the answer to her problems with Oracle, PDO and CLOBs - they're just not supported.

LOB support was added to PDO_OCI in PHP 5.1. This is really cool, however, it appears that the LOB support really means BLOB support. After much investigation and self-doubt (e.g. "what if we're using streams incorrectly?"), we found out that PDO_OCI does not currently support CLOBs (BLOBs only!).

The bug's already been documented and remains open, but Maggie encourages all of the Oracle developers out there with the fact that Chris Jones (of Oracle) knows about the issue and plans to correct it in the next release of the extension.

After struggling with it for a good while, Maggie Nelson finally figured out the answer to her problems with Oracle, PDO and CLOBs - they're just not supported.

LOB support was added to PDO_OCI in PHP 5.1. This is really cool, however, it appears that the LOB support really means BLOB support. After much investigation and self-doubt (e.g. "what if we're using streams incorrectly?"), we found out that PDO_OCI does not currently support CLOBs (BLOBs only!).

The bug's already been documented and remains open, but Maggie encourages all of the Oracle developers out there with the fact that Chris Jones (of Oracle) knows about the issue and plans to correct it in the next release of the extension.