Thanks to Marcie for helping myself and Kuassi run the lab. Marcie spent many hours working with content specialists (e.g. me) writing instructions, taking screen shots and generally making sure the OOW HOLs in her domain were accurate and professional. I've worked with her on several projects over the years, but today was the first time we actually got to meet.

After the PHP HOLs concluded, I went to the PHP booth to check the demonstrations were ready for tomorrow. To cut a long story short, Karthik & Kant from the Oracle Net team spent some time resolving a machine network problem. When I had configured the computer, I'd backed up a net interface configuration file. This backup file was being still being read and was causing a conflict. Karthik's help was absolutely invaluable - I can sleep tonight.

I had wanted to mention Karthik regardless of his help today. He is presenting Best Practices for Deployment, Performance, and Diagnosability of Oracle Net Services (Thursday 10:30am Moscone South Rm 104). Oracle Net is the glue between the DB and client tools/languages like PHP. Knowing what it can do for you and how to tune it are skills all DBAs should have.

On Tuesday, Levi Dixon and Nicholas Tang from Community Connect and Srinath Krishnaswamy from Oracle will talk on Building and Deploying Web-Scale Social Networking Applications, Using PHP and Oracle Database (Tuesday 1:00pm Marriott Salon 04). It is about using PHP and Oracle Database to run very large social networking sites, including BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com. Session details are below.

Another paper useful for PHP developers is Best Practices for Developing Performant Applications for Oracle Database 11g (Monday 2:30pm Marriott Salon 01). It shows how to interpret database statistics and tune your application code. For brevity, the code examples will be Java (there is an accompanying HOL later that uses C/C++ or Java), but the DB statistics analysis and programming concepts are the same for programmatic languages including PHP.

If you're interested in Ruby/Rails sessions, see my previous post.

To finish up, here's one of the many conference shuttle buses transporting people around the city:

His talk "Using Ruby on Rails with legacy Oracle database" is on Thursday at 10pm, Moscone West 3rd Floor.

All unconference sessions are listed at http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+OpenWorld+Unconference. There are still slots open.

Other Rails activity at OpenWorld includes an interesting session on Rails and Oracle Mix at 1pm Monday (Marriott Salon 14/15), and a Hands on Lab at 2:30pm Tuesday (Marriott Golden Gate B1).

We spent close to 11 hours setting up and working on Tuesday - it was busy, and 8 hours on Wednesday. (Note to self for OOW next week: wear sneakers). It's been a while since we had a booth at a PHP conference. It was great to meet such a cross section of attendees, many of whom were from overseas. Hi to everyone who dropped by. Thanks for doing our survey and congratulations to the raffle winners.

I have a few outstanding questions asked to me at the conference, which I'll attend to soon (or "momentarily" as they say here in the US).

I wasn't able to attend Luxi's connection pooling talk today, but I heard it went well. Thanks to the IRC chatter, I almost felt I was there.

I spoke briefly to some of the folk from Microsoft and IBM about PDO when they came by our booth. I can't see any sudden burst of activity happening, but we'll what does eventuate.

Special thanks to Kuassi for car-pooling, Todd for organizing our booth & raffle prizes, Yahoo for the USB sticks, and to Zend for another fine conference.

A few of my snaps are on flickr.

Under heavy security in the bowels of a secret building, this spy-phone photo shows some of the many laptops and servers being configured for exhibition hall booths.

The ever efficient organizing committee of PHP Quebec has reminded me that their call for speakers closes in a month. The conference is in Montreal, Canada between March 4 and 6th, 2009. It will be the seventh time the conference has run - wow.

The labs pack a lot into their respective slots, and I think you'll be very happy with them. The first lab is an introduction to PHP and the OCI8 extension. This is a new and improved version of the lab we ran last year. The second lab is a brand new course. It looks at more of the technologies used to build PHP Web apps - connection pooling, AJAX, debugging and frameworks.

The key thing I want to highlight: the PHP labs are on Sunday 21st - the very first day of the conference. From a marketing perspective this isn't perfect: it means that if you come to the exhibition hall on Monday or later, meet us at the PHP booth, and then want to attend the PHP labs, you will have missed out. So, make up your mind early and also spread the word to anyone else who might be interested.

The labs aren't the only events being run. I've mentioned one of the other exciting sessions in an earlier post. Kuassi has a full schedule here.

This is being co-presented by our friends at Community Connect. I've had the pleasure to see an advance copy of their slides. They will talk about their experiences and the savings that Oracle Database 11g Database Resident Connection Pooling (got all that?) brought to their PHP applications.

I've worked closely with Community Connect for some time. Seeing in one place a clear summary of their experiences with 11g and DRCP really reinforces the difference between their old architecture and the new one, and what it lets them achieve.

We'll supply computers. And lunch. Come along and sharpen your skill set

Details and registration can be found here.

The PHP community gave notice on 13 July 2007 that the end of PHP 4 was 8 August 2008. And so it has come.

All software projects have the same dilema about when to drop support for an old version. There is a huge effort required to maintain more than one source code branch. Some users are always going to be negatively affected by obsoletion but, for the project developers, project management will be easier and there will be more time available for innovation.

Sometimes dropping support is a development decision based on a technical shortcoming or recognition of maintenance costs of an old version. Users are warned in advance; even if they don't really like to be jolted, they know where they stand and set their own upgrade schedule.

Sometimes an old version naturally withers as user and core development interest transfers to a newer release.

In PHP land, PHP 5 has been out for four years and there has been almost zero PHP 4 maintenance for a long time. The "re-factored" OCI8 extension from circa 2005 has never been included in PHP 4 (get it from PECL and manually retrofit it to PHP 4).

It's time to upgrade. PHP 5.2 is stable. PHP 5.3 is alpha - it has support for namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures, garbage collection, and the PHP archive (PHAR), SQLite3, and intl extensions. See the NEWS file for all the changes

The Zend Engine (the PHP VM) interprets bytecode directly without performing any optimization. The phpllvm project provides a JIT compiler for the Zend Engine that is able to compile PHP/Zend bytecode to LLVM IR and then into optimized machine code, which can then be executed by the Zend engine. I'll describe how the JIT compiler hooks in the Zend engine and how the whole process works. I'll also describe possible future work, including a PHP compiler, PHP-specific optimizations, type-inference, etc.

Initially part of a Google Summer of Code project supervised by Nuno, he himself is now working on it. If his Masters thesis doesn't get in the way, we might see some very interesting uses of the work.

Nuno knows his stuff in this area. Next year I really would like to see him talking on this current project or general PHP optimization at a PHP conference.

In other news, the PHP community has been working hard on updating the Windows build infrastructure. Chatting on IRC this morning, Pierre said he hoped to get time to put Oracle Instant Client 11g and an updated OCI8 build script onto the PHP Windows build machine tonight. (Like much work on PHP, this will be done in his personal "spare" time.)

The plan is to build two mutually exclusive OCI8 DLLs: one using 10g and one using 11g libraries. This will let you choose which OCI8 DLL to use. If you need to connect back to Oracle 8.1, you can continue to use Instant Client 10gR2. If you connect to Oracle 9.2 or greater - or perhaps you want to use Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP) - you can use the PHP OCI8 DLL built with Instant Client 11gR1.