More and more companies are moving applications over to PHP from their older legacy systems. Some of these business applications were using one of the more powerful (and stable) databases out there, Oracle. Or, maybe you're working up a completely new application that requires something that has a firm ground in stored procedures and foreign keys - so, the choice is Oracle again - but how easy is it to integrate your PHP application into this popular database? Well, with the knowledge from this article under your belt, it should be no problem.

In Abstracting Oracle Connectivity with PHP/OCI8, they step you through the abstraction layer that they've created, and explain how it can help you provide that layer of ease between you and the actual Oracle server. It saves you the trouble of typing the same thing over and over again, as well as making a standardized way for you to get the results.

They also explain one of the more complex aspects of using the store procedures in Oracle - fetching the results. It's slightly different from just using an OCIFetch to grab the results, so be wary of that...