Alison Holloway's Blog

Richard Rendell, my manager, and leader of all things PHP at Oracle, has an article in this month's International PHP Magazine. Here's a reprint of the original article.

It has info on connection options with Oracle databases, and the new connection pooling feature. Nice work Richard.

After a few weeks of furious writing, Chris Jones and I have released the latest version of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual. This is version 1.4, and includes updates on:

• PHP PDO_OCI extension

• Testing the OCI8 extension

• Tracing OCI8 internals

• Comaprison of old and new OCI8 function names

• and lots more to keep you busy
  

I've just been setting up PHP 5.2.2 on Windows XP Pro, with Apache 2.0.59. I couldn't get Apache to find the correct php.ini file. It was looking in C:\Windows, instead of where I installed PHP. The httpd.conf file told Apache to look in C:\Program Files\PHP, but it wasn't. So none of the extensions were loading.

I figured out that changing the back slashes to forward slashes fixes the problem. I wanted to blog about this as The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual that we've just released doesn't mention this problem, and you may encounter it yourselves. So if you do, you know the fix. And yes, I've logged a bug with PHP for this. :-)

Zend have just released a new version of Zend Core for Oracle. This is a prebuilt and tested stack of Apache, PHP and Oracle Instant Client. If you haven't used it before, you will like the easy setup. I promise.

Try this with an existing Oracle database install, or download and install Oracle Database XE, our free database.

Zend Core for Oracle is also supported with Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Zend Core for Oracle release 2.0 includes PHP 5.2.1, the refactored OCI8 driver, Oracle Instant Client, and an optional Apache HTTP Server 2.2.2.

Zend Core for Oracle is supported by Zend on the following operating systems: 

* Oracle Enterprise Linux 
* X86 running SLES9 or RHEL3 or RHEL4 
* X86 running Windows XP/2003/Vista 
* X86-64 running Windows Vista in 32bit mode 
* X86-64 running SLES9 or RHEL3 or RHEL4 
* pSeries running AIX 5.2 or 5.3 
* Sun Solaris Sparc 8, 9 10

The web servers that are supported are: 

* Apache 1.3.x (except on Windows Vista), Apache 2.x 
* Oracle HTTP Server 10.1.2.0.0 (on Linux and Windows x86) 
* Microsoft IIS 5, 6, 7

Zend Core for Oracle is supported (by Zend) against Oracle Database 10g and 9i. That means that you can have a fully supported stack of database, web server and PHP.

If you aren't sure how to use it, or want more information on install, configuration, and use, go and have a read of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual. Yet another handy resource for all things PHP and Oracle. And another shameless plug from me.

Don't forget there are lots of articles, FAQs, downloads and links at the OTN PHP Developer Center.

Since I've started blogging about little idiosyncracies I've been experiencing in PHP, I've been getting feedback that you want more. Okay. I'll start adding little tid-bits that might help out someone out there. So here's one I found (again) today.

While testing the bug fix I mentioned in an blog entry last week, I found that trying to load the phpinfo() script caused my browser to try loading the file as an application. That is, it tried to download the file, rather than execute the script. This happened in Firefox and IE. For those not familiar with phpinfo(), it's a function that displays the setup of PHP, including loaded extensions, environment variables, PHP variables, and so on. Here's what you would use:

phpinfo.php

<?php

phpinfo();

?>