Seeing as how I have started working solely with Oracle 10g at work, I have moved away from monitoring changes to the MySQL database and now watch changes coming from the Oracle camp. One of the biggest issues that the developers and my company face is moving all our code from an antiquated scripting language over to PHP. PHP and Oracle has a decent agreement when it comes to handling database transacations, but it's nothing to write home about. The PHP lacks any form of good database connection pooling when it comes to Oracle.

For sites that get a couple dozen thousand hits a day, connection pooling probably isn't a major issue. For our sites, we generally get page requests in the millions per day, connection pooling is a major issue. It has been the main reason for us not moving solely over to PHP.

Last week, Oracle announced that it would be releasing a new OCI8 driver for PHP. Here are highlights from the release

-- Breakthrough Scalability -- leveraging Oracle Database 11g's Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP) feature, a large number of users can be supported with significantly reduced memory consumption. Multiple web servers running on different systems can share a single database connection pool, helping to further reduce consumption of system resources; -- High Availability -- supports advanced Oracle Database features such as fast application notification with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard. PHP applications can benefit from reduced downtime and higher levels of availability with this feature; -- Extended Compatibility -- existing PHP applications can take advantage of DRCP and fast application notification without changes in application code, resulting in an immediate boost in scalability, enabling more efficient hardware utilization and lower TCO.

It appears that connection pooling was one of the main features that was upgraded with this driver release. Unfortunately for us, we run 10g, not 11g, which is what the articles says is getting the driver update.

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