He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

An LDIF file is a simple text file that can contain those LDAP information, which can be separated into two groups. On the one hand, it can hold exported LDAP data in a text format. The other purpose of LDIF is to use it for importing data into an LDAP based system. So it can contain data to be imported or just commands that shall be processed. This is an important fact, because that opens the door to an interesting workaround.

This workaround allows you to import large amounts of data quickly and easy by dumping it into the server via a simple PHP script. The code is included in the post, but you'll need to have the binaries to get the LDIF and LDAP functionality working together.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapeco on June 20." [...] He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

The schedule for the event can be found here with details on which talks will be given when (including Elton's at 8am on the 21st.

The whitepaper talks about the changes in the PHP OCI8 1.3 extension, explains some of the concepts behind DRCP and FAN, and gives best practices and tuning tips. It includes a new PHP benchmark which shows up to 20,000 connections being handled by Oracle on commodity hardware using only 2G RAM.

The paper also talks about the FAN support that's built in - the ability for PHP to use the Oracle RAC cluster functionality to make for high availability (switching between nodes). The latest beta with all of this functionality in it can be grabbed from its page on the PECL site.

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

Oracle Magazine's May/June 2008 issue contains a "Developer Nation" article. In it, David Kelly interviews Levi Dixon from Community Connect about using PHP and Oracle.

The article references the Oracle/PHP "strange combination" that used to exist and how it's evolved into a vital, living part of Oracle's stack (like with the OCI8 extension).

I wrote a small script a while back that's gained a surprising amount of popularity thanks to a plug from the site that it posts to. [...] I learned that this [connection from the script] could be done with streams, I attempted to implement it in that fashion, but ran into strange issues where I would get 404 or 500-level HTTP errors rather than the response I was expected.

He eventually found the bug related to his problem (in the 5.2.x branch) but happily notes that it has been corrected and will be patched in the upcoming 5.3 (and 6) branches.

I've merged connection pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) support to PHP 5.3's OCI8 extension. The PHP 5.3 OCI8 code is Beta - in fact, PHP 5.3 itself is still really "Development". (It would be handy to have problems reported before PHP 5.3 goes Production).

He also includes instructions on how to get this new version installed inside of the latest PHP 5.3 snapshot (http://snaps.php.net) to build the new support in.