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.

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.

Hang on, weren't we up to OCI8 version 1.3? Well, yes, but that's Beta bordering on Production. In the meantime, I wanted to make the OCI8 bug fixes from PHP 5.2.6 available in a "Production" release and keep PECL OCI8 1.2 in sync with PHP 5.2. The changelog is here.

Updates include bug fixes for cursor leaking, a LOB leak, a problem with collection creation and an update to the compile option for the Instant Client to look for RPMs.

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.

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.

When PHP is done with the temporary LOB, it needs to tell Oracle to destroy it. If this isn't done, then the temporary LOB will hang around using DB space until the connection is closed. I just merged a fix worked on by Krishna Mohan and myself for bug 43497.

Example code is included showing two instances of its use - a normal use that frees the memory correctly and the other showing how to create the temporary lob to hold the data as needed.