According to this new post on Chrisopher Jones' blog, Oracle has listened to it's PHP users and is implementing something in the 11g version of their database they've been asking for for a while - connection pooling.

We're interested in how users might configure and use the connection pool in PHP and other tools. This will directly influence the configurability vs complexity of PHP's OCI8 implementation.

They're also looking to add an attribute into the php.ini file to see whether or not the server needs to disconnect at the end of an oci_close or not. Stay tuned for more information as it comes up about this cool new functionality.