Wez Furlong has a note on his blog today that they latest version of the OCI8 extension has been pushed into PECL.

You may have heard of the Zend Core for Oracle; as part of that project the oci8 extension for PHP received a lot of attention from teams of people from Zend, Oracle and OmniTI. As a result, the oci8 extension is now more robust, performant, better documented and more thoroughly tested than ever before (the list of closed bugs is enourmous).

Although the extension is currently marked as beta, it's a significant improvement over the older versions that have shipped with PHP.

You can grab it with a "pear upgrade oci8-beta" command on Unix systems, or, for those Windows users out there, you can get it off of the snaps site. Keep an eye out for the updated docs too...

Update: for more information from a different perspective, check out Andi Gutmans' blog entry on the topic too.