Chris Jones and Alison Holloway released today version 1.4 of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual[PDF]. An excellent reference for the PHP Oracle developper in 17 chapters and 195 pages. The e-Book cover different issues for installing PHP, Oracle with the different extensions available and connecting them to each other. You can find also how to tune connections by changing OCI8 calls, the network configuration and by tuning the database. More advanced topics are covered such using PL/SQL with OCI8, using large objects in OCI8, using XML, globalization, and a very short chapter but consistent about tracing OCI8 internals. Lots of changes have been made in this release including :
- Updated the versions of software in the install steps. Show how to use the Windows MSI installer. Added a section on upgrading OCI8 in PHP4. Added a section on enabling PDO.
- Updated the SQL Developer section (thanks to Sue Harper).
- Improved and extended the examples. Many more can now be cut-and-pasted and run standalone.
- Added new connection performance tips.
- Show how to retrieve PL/SQL “success with information” errors.
- Added a section on testing.
- Added a chapter mapping PHP 4 to PHP 5 function names.
- Added a chapter on mapping ora_* to oci_* function names
