LAMP & Oracle Technical Information

From within a PHP development environment, you have several extentions at your disposal to access an Oracle database:

• The Oracle extension: This extension was designed for Oracle 7 and should be avoided since it uses a deprecated version the Oracle API that will not be available in future release.

• ODBC within Windows: While ODBC provides some connection pooling and other built-in features, it lacks access to many Oracle's capabilities such as the ability to store large objects(LOBs).

• PDO: This portable database API makes it easy to change your database without changing a lot of your code.

• OCI8: This extension supports most of Oracle's Oracle Call Interface (OCI).