PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones

I've created a PECL OCI8 1.3.1 Beta bundle of the code with Connection Pooling support that I mentioned in http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/01/31.  You can get it from http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.  The README contains the details.

The new PECL bundle will build with PHP 5.2.x (or PHP 5.3 - but the PHP 5.3 snaps already include the code, so there is no need to use PECL for this version).

This release is still marked Beta - please test it.

The bundle also includes all the latest non-DRCP related bug fixes,
e.g some Temporary LOB and cursor leak fixes, so you might want to get
it just for these.

One change to look out for is a fix for persistent connection pinging (PECL Bug #12431 ). This reverts a previous patch of two years ago since we don't think there is a problem with OCIPing in Oracle, and OCIPIng is needed to get the correct behavior with dead connections.  The original report was never fully investigated and a lot has been improved in the code since then.  Anyway, if you have an "old" version of Oracle and see any problem with pinging in the OCI8 1.3.1 Beta extension, let me know. There are no immediate plans to merge this fix to PHP 5.2.