On his blog today, Zeev Suraski has this new post with his (brief) look at one of the latest offerings from Zend and Oracle - the Zend Core for Oracle.

As some people may have noticed, Zend Core for Oracle went into a public beta stage a couple of days ago. This free product is excellent news for anybody using PHP and Oracle together, since the OCI8 extension was vastly improved to bring it on par with (and sometimes better than) other database extensions, both in terms of stability and performance.

It's actually good news even for people who won't be using Zend Core - since like with any other fixes made to PHP in the course of the work on Core (and in general), these will be committed to the PHP CVS as soon as they're tested (probably a couple of days' time).

I still haven't gotten a chance to try this one out, but with encouraging things like this being said about it I have high hopes.

Has anyone out there gotten a chance to compile it in and get it up and running? Any benchmarks?