On the EasyTech blog, there's a recent post for Zend Framework developers out there working with the Oracle database showing how to execute PL/SQL code from your Zend_Db queries.

Calling PL/SQL code from PHP can be tricky sometimes, specially when the PL/SQL procedure has input and output parameters. In this posting I will show you how to call a procedure from the PHP using Zend Framework. I will assume you have some experience using Zend Framework, specially the Database module (Zend_db).

He walks through the creation of a simple PL/SQL stored procedure and how to prepare your query to get results out of it (Zend_Db_Statement_Oracle and an execute call). There's a few stipulations you'll need to follow - named parameters, reserving space for the output and using references for output variables.

In a new post, Christopher Jones talks about some difficulty a friend of his was having with returning a connection type from Oracle back to a script. In his case, it was a Ruby script and, unfortunately, there's no direct support for it. So, Christopher jumped in to help out.

PHP's oci8 extension oci_bind_array_by_name() can bind collections but there is no equivalent in ruby-oci8.

Justin outlines a solution on his blog Ruby: Invoking a PL/SQL Package with Array args. His example relies on some company infrastructure so I came up with this standalone example. This first SQL*Plus script sets up the scenario.

Stick with me on this one - there's some PHP right there at the end. He shows how much simpler the same kind of operation would be in PHP thanks to the oci_bind_array_by_name functionality understanding the return value. What took about 20 lines for just the Ruby code to handle the result correctly takes only five in PHP.