In this new post to his Oracle blog, Christopher Jones mentions some updates he's made to the OCI8 extension for PHP:

I've merged connection pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) support to PHP 5.3's OCI8 extension. The PHP 5.3 OCI8 code is Beta - in fact, PHP 5.3 itself is still really "Development". (It would be handy to have problems reported before PHP 5.3 goes Production).

He also includes instructions on how to get this new version installed inside of the latest PHP 5.3 snapshot (http://snaps.php.net) to build the new support in.