OCI8 extension for Oracle have been improved in PHP5.3 with 7 bugs fixed in addition to many improvements and new features mainly :

  • Added Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) support.
  • Added support for Oracle External Authentication (not supported on Windows).
  • Improve persistent connection handling of restarted DBs.
  • Added SQLT_AFC (aka CHAR datatype) support to oci_bind_by_name
  • Changed default value of oci8.default_prefetch from 10 to 100.
  • Allow building (e.g from PECL) the PHP 5.3-based OCI8 code with PHP 4.3.9 onwards
  • Provide separate extensions for Oracle 11g and 10g on Windows.

oracle-php
Oracle support for PHP is already 12 years old since the php/fi 2.0, at that time the oracle.c and oracle.h where checked by Stig S