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 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