Christopher Jones talkes about some updates that he's made to the default PDO functionality of PHP, adding in a few things like pre-fetching and methods to get the details of the database server you're using.

After PHP 5.2.4 shipped and a new release cycle began, I merged a couple of enhancements to PDO_OCI attribute handling. Specifically I added $dbh->getAttribute() support for ATTR_SERVER_VERSION, ATTR_SERVER_INFO, ATTR_CLIENT_VERSION and. ATTR_AUTOCOMMIT. At the moment these are only available in the PHP snapshots on http://snaps.php.net/. Let me know if there are any issues so they can be resolved before the next PHP release.

He gives examples of two things - the pre-fetching functionality, allowing for better optimization for a query, and the transaction management features, making it as simple as a try{} block to test the commit and rollback if needed.

He also mentions other properties/attributes included in the new release - ATTR_PERSISTENT, ATTR_TIMEOUT, ATTR_ORACLE_NULLS, ATTR_CASE and ATTR_ERRMODE, ATTR_SERVER_VERSION and ATTR_CLIENT_VERSION (the last two have examples).