HP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

You can find out more about the package and download this latest edition from its PECL page or check out the whitepaper they recent;y wrote up about PHP and Oracle scalability.

We decided that this one package should be split into subpackages: one subpackage per region/country. Some advantages of this approach are that each driver / filter / subpackage gets it's own stability and version number - we wouldn't have to keep increasing the version number of Date_Holidays each time a new driver is added or when an existing driver gets a significant number of fixes.

To replace your current version of the package (with all of the regions built in) with a new version that still contains all versions, uninstall the Date_Holidays and grab the "Date_Holidays#all" package. Otherwise, you can check out the PEAR page for the main package and see the subpackage list if you only need one for your area.

The post explains what each of the technologies are for and where they fit in most development. The PDO_MYSQLND functionality is a direct connection for the PDO libraries to connect to MySQL using the native driver.

PDO_MYSQLND inherits all benefits of the MySQL native driver for PHP. In addition to the shared advantages you get the first PDO driver for MySQL developed by Sun/MySQL!

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.

Of course, it's still in beta, so any testing and feedback is more than welcome. This bundle also includes several other "non-DRCP related bug fixes" including an issue that caused constant pinging for persistent connections.

This isn't replacing freetds any time soon. I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.

He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.