Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Oracle Makes PHP Code Open Source (PHP License)

Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle® Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.

The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems. Highlights include:

* 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.

"Oracle continues its long track record of contributions to the open source community, and with this OCI8 database driver for PHP we also help PHP developers leverage the power of the industry-leading Oracle Database 11g," said Ken Jacobs, vice president Product Strategy, Server Technologies, Oracle. "With these new enterprise-class features that Oracle brings to the PHP community, we expect to further strengthen PHP as a tool of choice and expand use of Oracle Database for Web 2.0 and mission-critical enterprise application deployments."