In this new post to his blog Chris Jones looks at an option to increase the performance of your PHP/Oracle application even more - converting a REF CURSOR into a piped data set via the PDO_OCI extension.

REF CURSORs are common in Oracle's stored procedural language PL/SQL. They let you pass around a pointer to a set of query results. However in PHP, PDO_OCI doesn't yet allow fetching from them. [...] One workaround, when you can't rewrite the PL/SQL code to do a normal query, is to write a wrapper function that pipes the output.

He includes an example, creating an example myproc() that contains the query to select the last names of all employees in the table. This procedure is put inside of a package so it can be called directly in the SQL statement and the ref cursor can be automatically piped to output.

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.