The Underground PHP and Oracle® Manual, Release 1.5, December 2008. Copyright © 2008, Oracle. Authors: Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway. This book is designed to bridge the gap between the many PHP and the many Oracle texts available. It shows how to use the PHP scripting language with the Oracle database, from installation to using them efficiently. The installation and database discussion in this book highlights the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, but everything covered in this book also applies to the other editions of the Oracle database, including Oracle Database 11g. The PHP you write for Oracle Database 10g Express Edition can be run, without change, against all editions of the Oracle database as well. Oracle Database 10g Express Edition is free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer. This book is aimed at PHP programmers who are developing applications for an Oracle database. The Oracle Database is well known for its scalability, reliability and features. It is the leading database and is available on many platforms. An Oracle database stores and retrieves data. Each database consists of one or more data files. An Oracle database server consists of an Oracle database and an Oracle instance. Every time a server is started, a shared memory region called the system global area ( SGA ) is allocated and the Oracle background processes are started. The combination of the background processes and SGA is called an Oracle instance. PHP is a hugely popular, interpreted scripting language commonly used for web applications. PHP is open source and free. The language is dynamically typed and easy to use. PHP comes with many extensions offering all kinds of functionality such as database access. PHP 5 introduced strong object orientated capabilities. PHP is typically installed as an Apache module, or run by the web server using FastCGI. It includes the PHP OCI8 extension and is linked with the Oracle Client Libraries, enabling Oracle Database access. This book is not a complete PHP syntax or Oracle SQL guide. It does not describe overall application architecture. It is assumed that you already have basic PHP and SQL knowledge and want best practices in using PHP against an Oracle database.

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