Oracle PHP Magazine

What's New for PHP 5.3 OCI8 Extension

2009-06-30T21:14:04Z

OCI8 extension for Oracle have been improved in PHP5.3 with 7 bugs fixed in addition to many improvements and new features mainly :

Added Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) support.
Added support for Oracle External Authentication (not supported on Windows).
Improve persistent connection handling of restarted DBs.
Added SQLT_AFC (aka CHAR datatype) support to oci_bind_by_name
Changed default value of oci8.default_prefetch from 10 to 100.
Allow building (e.g from PECL) the PHP 5.3-based OCI8 code with PHP 4.3.9 onwards
Provide separate extensions for Oracle 11g and 10g on Windows.

Oracle support for PHP is already 12 years old since the php/fi 2.0, at that time the oracle.c and oracle.h where checked by Stig S�ther Bakken on April 1997. Download PHP 5.3, For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between 5.2 and 5.3 releases.

Thoughts On Oracle and Sun Deal

2009-04-20T22:22:01Z

Sun and Oracle announced today a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun�s cash and debt. An agreement that will make of Oracle the first competitor to IBM by having Sun technologies in hardware, Java, Operation system (Solaris), Open Office and even the most popular open source database for the web MySQL !

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

The deal could have very positive effect on Oracle business as mentioned Oracle CEO, especially by providing full solution from hardware, operation system, Java, in addition to Oracle business and database solutions. But until the deal close and real result of this acquisition become visible, things might gets worse before it gets better.

Drawing ER Diagrams For Oracle Schemas With PHP And GraphViz

2008-12-15T10:15:26Z

As a DBA, I have been asked many times to provide an ER diagram for an application schema. There are many tools that can do the job, mostly expensive CASE tools which have reverse engineering capabilities. There are also some rather exotic freeware tools which are largely unsupported and difficult to find.

Fortunately, there is a software tool ideal for drawing ER diagrams, called GraphViz. GraphViz is a general tool for drawing all kinds of graphs. It was created by AT&T Research specifically for graph drawing and it uses so called "dot" language. The tool itself is available on the following web page: http://graphviz.org

The tool uses rather simple language called "dot", which would not be a problem to generate by PHP but the task can be simplified even further. It turns out that PHP Extension and Application Repository, known as "PEAR" contains a package with PHP bindings for GraphViz. The home page for this package is http://pear.php.net/package/Image_GraphViz. In order to use GraphViz, one has to install the GraphViz package, highly portable and available for many platforms, both MS Windows and Linux, among others. Installing the PHP bindings for GraphViz with PEAR installer is also a breeze:

#> pear install Image_GraphViz 
downloading Image_GraphViz-1.2.1.tar ... 
Starting to download Image_GraphViz-1.2.1.tar (Unknown size) 
........done: 23,040 bytes 
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Image_GraphViz-1.2.1 
#>

Now, let's see the basic elements of the "dot" language:

Underground PHP & Oracle Manual, December 2008 Edition Released

2008-12-09T18:29:55Z

Just in time for the gift-giving season - as mentioned christopher in his blog - annoucing the December edition of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We have announced the previous edition 1.4 of the manual back in may 2007. The current edition is written by Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway, it include 290 pages and 16 chapters and is 50% bigger than the previous edition - unfortunately we don't have the previous edition at this time to compare, but what we can say is that it's a great eBook that you should get for anyone working with PHP and Oracle.

The manual still aims to bridge the gap between the multitude of PHP books and Oracle books on the market. It is still a "braindump" and in no way replaces any of the other PHP-Oracle books in the marketplace. They all cover different aspects of development with PHP and Oracle, and I encourage you to also consider them for your bookshelf.

Download Underground PHP and Oracle Manual [PDF]

XpertDeploy For Oracle� Increases Productivity Of Developers Up To 800%

2008-04-18T06:48:16Z

XpertDeploy is a Developer Application Deployment Tool that have just released today. A solution that helps developers and DB administrators to improve their application deployment and eliminiate wasted time. Below the press release :

SQL Interpreter Provides Uniform Method for Application Deployment

Georgetown, TX - April 17, 2008 - XpertDeploy, a leading provider of database developer and administrator productivity solutions, announced today the general availability of XpertDeploy� For Oracle�.

"Tasks associated with deploying updates to our application or with a new application release costs our team 16 - 20 hours of unproductive time per month," said Tom Beggs, Vice President of Information Technology for a logistics software provider. "By using XpertDeploy� For Oracle�, that wasted time was reduced to just 4 hours, saving us 12 - 16 hours. The system paid for itself the first month".

Beginning PHP and Oracle from Novice to Professional Reviewed

2008-04-04T06:41:13Z

Apress published on August 2007 a great book on PHP and oracle by W. Jason Gilmore, and Bob Bryla. The book, with its 763 pages and 40 chapters, include a full coverage on working with PHP and oracle from novice to professional as the book title indicates. Since I'm working everyday with PHP and Oracle, I spent more time than usual to finish reading the entire book - but I defintely enjoy it.

Getting started with PHP

The first three chapters include an introduction to PHP from the programming language history, to the differences between different version of PHP 4,5 and 6, then the general language features, and why is it an excellent choice for Oracle database. Many Oracle developers don't consider the choice of PHP as a good one, or still confused between using .Net, Java, PHP or other web solutions. Getting your hands on this book will defenitely answer a lot of questions, and you can see by yourself if developing PHP and Oracle web applications is suitable for your needs.

The Second chapter is about configuring your environment on Linux and Windows platform. So you have the choice here for working on your favorite envrionment and you can make it fit with the production server. The book provides very general directives to configure PHP and Apache. No mention of Oracle until here, not even the oracle and oci extensions, or the pdo for PHP5 and later. Oracle is introduced at the chapter 26, so you probably have to jump there if you want to have the entire environment ready. What's interesting in chapter two is the recommendation for a code editor - I personaly use Notepad++ - and how to choose a hosting provider. Practical information that you need to know, especially for novice users.

In the Third chapter you will learn the PHP basics : how to create a basic web page, print dynamic content, PHP datatypes, strings, loop structures, file inclusion ... etc. All the necessary small tips that you need to know to get started. This is probably the best part of the book for beginners, because it explains clearly the PHP language, and help to get started creating small scripts before moving into the development of large web applications with oracle.

Building Scalable PHP Oracle Applications - Part One

2008-02-20T13:26:15Z

Often as a developer you find yourself maintaining legacy code that just was not built for the large stresses it is now under. Writing scalable applications should cost no more than non scalable ones, in-fact they can be smaller! And when you are planning your next web application that will take over the world you have to start somewhere. This article should demonstrate techniques for design that allow for horizontal and vertical scaling. In this first part we'll talk about the principles of database abstraction, in the next in the series we will discover more about implementation using PHP's oci8 extensions with example classes for your use.

PHP Strengths

PHP is a fast web scripting language especially when compiled as an apache module, and is an excellent thin web layer that scales well horizontally. PHP and Apache can handle many transactions quickly, compared to a more heavy weight application server such as JBoss, hungry in terms of CPU and memory per request.

Oracle Strengths

Oracle is a robust, high performance transactional DBMS. It can also perform complex data processing through its native PL/SQL language. MySQL achilles heal is its transactional processing capabilities, although ISAM is fast on selects a single update or insert locks the entire table. Increasingly with user interactive and user generated content of the WEB 2.0 era transaction processing is king.

PHP RPMs for Oracle

2007-07-05T15:54:45Z

Oracle have just released a set of PHP RPMs for Oracle which include OCI8 and Oracle PDO driver, as well as many other PHP extensions. I think this is great, even it's for development testing only and not supported by Oracle. The RPMs are based on PHP 5.2.3, according to the blog post by Alison Holloway from Oracle.

RPMs can be downloaded from http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/, to install the PHP OCI8 you will need to install the Oracle's free Instant Client Basic package and PHP's php-pdo package :

1- as root run :

rpm -ivh php-common-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm php-cli-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm php-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm

2- Download oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.3-1.i386.rpm and install it

rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.3-1.i386.rpm

3- Install PHP's PDO extension :

rpm -ivh php-pdo-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm

4- Install PHP's Oracle OCI8 and PDO_OCI extensions :

rpm -ivh php-oci8-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm

Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on Linux

2007-06-05T05:40:04Z

Christopher Jones posted an excellent step by step howto upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on Linux. Pretty useful if you want to migrate to PHP5 for example with the release 3 or Oracle 10g. Personally my big worries is not with Linux, but with Sun Solaris, because I have here a quite old server with some funny limitations like the command line to type the PHP configure, and an old oracle version. Sincerely I can't wait to move everything to linux and update oracle, and stop facing everyday old systems limitations.

The technical problem faced with building PHP is that the Oracle libraries for AS do not include header files. This can be overcome by linking PHP with Oracle Instant Client but care needs to be taken so that AS itself does not use the Instant Client libraries. Otherwise you will get errors or unpredictable behavior.

Underground PHP and Oracle Manual 1.4 Available

2007-05-15T07:06:01Z

Chris Jones and Alison Holloway released today version 1.4 of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual[PDF]. An excellent reference for the PHP Oracle developper in 17 chapters and 195 pages. The e-Book cover different issues for installing PHP, Oracle with the different extensions available and connecting them to each other. You can find also how to tune connections by changing OCI8 calls, the network configuration and by tuning the database. More advanced topics are covered such using PL/SQL with OCI8, using large objects in OCI8, using XML, globalization, and a very short chapter but consistent about tracing OCI8 internals. Lots of changes have been made in this release including :

Updated the versions of software in the install steps. Show how to use the Windows MSI installer. Added a section on upgrading OCI8 in PHP4. Added a section on enabling PDO.
Updated the SQL Developer section (thanks to Sue Harper).
Improved and extended the examples. Many more can now be cut-and-pasted and run standalone.
Added new connection performance tips.
Show how to retrieve PL/SQL "success with information" errors.
Added a section on testing.
Added a chapter mapping PHP 4 to PHP 5 function names.
Added a chapter on mapping ora_* to oci_* function names

Identity Management Using PHP and Oracle

2007-05-01T09:35:56Z

Michael McLaughlin posted a first part of a new article titled Identity Management Using PHP over the OTN. The first part focus on how to design and manage your authentication system, exploring the architecture, Authentication process and the Encryption to implement a basic identity management solution. Part 2 of the article will explore different methods of database access and how identity management can leverage security policies in an Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD), as well as with the built-in DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO package.

In this article, you will learn how to implement identity management in PHP-based Web applications. You will learn how to design and implement an Oracle Identity Management database model, and plan and manage all aspects of user interactions in a browser-hosted application.

Just wanted to mention that Michael is author of Oracle Database 10g Express Edition PHP Web Programming, an excellent introductory book to PHP programming with Oracle database 10g Express Edition to develop enterprise applications.

eZ Publish Extension for Oracle Released under Open Source license

2007-04-25T07:19:09Z

eZ Systems announced today the availability of eZ Publish Extension for Oracleas Open Source and it displayed its strong commitment to Open Source community. The software was previously available under a proprietary license and was sold from $899 to $2999. It is now freely available ! It is noticeable that latest version 1.4 of eZPublish extension for oracle database include support for eZPublish 3.8 in addition to clustering. Documentation available here.

"Our strategy is in delivering Open Source software with support and services tailored to our customers' needs. The Open Source GPL release of the eZ Publish Extension for Oracle� Database is yet another way for eZ to show our dedication to this strategy," says Ba*rd Farstad, VP Business Development at eZ Systems.

Oracle To Acquire Enterprise Performance Management Leader Hyperion

2007-03-02T14:48:30Z

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 1, 2007 - Hyperion (Nasdaq Global Select: HYSL), a leading global provider of performance management software solutions today announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Oracle Corporation through a cash tender offer for $52.00 per share, or approximately $3.3 billion.

"Requirements for Performance Management and Business Intelligence solutions are increasingly converging," said Hyperion Chief Executive Officer Godfrey Sullivan. "Given the critical need for managers across the enterprise to align operational decisions with strategy, now is the right time for Hyperion to combine with a strategic partner like Oracle to deliver the first, integrated end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System."

Oracle with PHP and PDO

2006-10-29T16:40:09Z

ThinkPHP blog have an entry on Oracle with PHP and PDO and PHP training for oracle users! Andreas suffered from the fatal semi-colon, which become one of my favorite bugs here since I'm working more than usual with Oracle and facing this frequently, especially that most developers here work locally on MySQL database and the final product run on Oracle Database but we didn't convert yet to PDO.

At the end of the training, our customer got a good first insight into PHP and its PDO connection to the Oracle database server (besides some other subjects). I personally think it's easier to start PHP with MySQL because for most web based applications it's a tough and sturdy database handling even some slightly inappropriate statements in the way the developer would assume it to do.
On the other hand, if your company uses Oracle, you'll be able to store your web application data in the same database you use for all other applications if you just know which details might be a little tricky.

Zend Core for Oracle 1.5.0 Released

2006-09-26T08:28:17Z

Zend Core� for Oracle� supports businesses using PHP with Oracle Database for business-critical Web applications. It provides a seamless out-of-the-box experience delivering a stable, high performance, easy-to-install and supported PHP development and production environment fully integrated with the Oracle Database. New in this release :

* PHP 5.1.6 support
* Updated Zend Core for Oracle, PHP extension list
* Improved the Zend Enabler for Windows (PHP bug fix)
* Updated Client libraries
* Upgrade the Zend Core embedded Apache to the latest version � 2.0.59
* Update of ZCO extension list and client libraries
* Updated Oracle OCI8 extension and Oracle Instant Client
* New! Optional installation and configuration of Apache 2.0.59 for Unix

More information and download at Zend.com