Christopher Jones

In a theme being attributed to Tony Bibbs, Andi tagged me. Also see http://in2it.be/whotaggedwho.php. I have a mixed accent due to being English, but growing up in America and later Australia. My first computer was a Sharp PC-1211. I cycled... christopher.jones

Now that Python 3000 has been released, Anthony Tuininga has announced cx_Oracle 5.0, the latest version of the extension for Oracle Database access. His announcement email contains all the details. Among the new features, it support Oracle 11g Connection Pooling... christopher.jones

(The bottom one is the now- old edition of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. The latest edition can be downloaded free from www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/underground-php-oracle-manual.pdf)... christopher.jones

A "php-oci8-11gR1" RPM is now available on the "Unbreakable Linux Network" (http://linux.oracle.com/) in the Oracle channel. If you have the appropriate ULN subscription, you can use 'up2date' or 'yum' to install it and its dependencies (e.g. the Oracle Instant Client... christopher.jones

Just in time for the gift-giving season, and at a price you can't beat. A hot-off-the-press, free, 290 page, updated version of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual is available for download from http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/underground-php-oracle-manual.pdf One of my tasks after the... christopher.jones

As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive... christopher.jones

Last week's PHP Brasil '08 conference was held at the "UNIFIEO" University in Osasco, a region of São Paulo. São Paulo is a large, busy center of commerce. People work hard. Everyone at the conference seemed to have multiple jobs... christopher.jones

At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. You've probably already read my previous post about Felipe Pena as a role model. Rafael Dohms gave a talk about getting involved in the PHP community and... christopher.jones

There is a lot happening around PHP in Brazil - there were 10 concurrent tracks at the PHP Brasil '08 conference in São Paulo last week. Brazilian PHP users are - and can become further - involved with many PHP... christopher.jones

Paul Vallee from Pythian emailed me that they have a new installation guide out. The name says it all: Installing Oracle 11gR1 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.... christopher.jones

It's a conference with a difference: PHP Brasil '08 is on next week. Yours truly will be presenting an extended session on Friday. My colleague Todd Trichler will also be in town to help present one of our great "InstallFests"... christopher.jones

REF CURSORs are common in Oracle's stored procedural language PL/SQL. They let you pass around a pointer to a set of query results. However in PHP, PDO_OCI doesn't yet allow fetching from them. And fetching from REF CURSORS in OCI8... christopher.jones

Anthony Tuinga's released cx_Oracle 4.4.1 yesterday: http://cx-oracle.sourceforge.net/. Changes are here.... christopher.jones

Blair Layton hosted the October Singapore PHP User Group meeting at Oracle's offices. Video is at http://blog.php.com.sg/archives/singapore-php-meetup-oct-2008-oracle. He covered PHP & Oracle, showed APEX, and talked about connection pooling. Nice talk Blair!... christopher.jones

Oracle Database 11g introduced "server-side"and "client-side" result caches. The database cache is enabled with the RESULT_CACHE_MODE database parameter, which has several modes. With the default mode, queries for which you want results to be cached need a hint added: $s... christopher.jones

Immediately after OOW, Alison and I have got straight into updating the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We've had our heads right down. Stay tuned. We've still got a few items on our ToDo list but the new, improved version... christopher.jones

Immediately after OOW, Alison and I have got straight into updating the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We've had our heads right down. Stay tuned. We've still got a few items on our ToDo list but the new, improved version... christopher.jones

I should wrap up my OOW conference coverage. As you could predict from my pre-posts about the conference schedule we had some interesting sessions. I was extremely pleased to meet the guys from Community Connect who gave an excellent presentation... christopher.jones

The PHP Hands-On-Labs went smoothly today. What a pleasant feeling! There was great interest - all but two seats had been pre-booked for the first lab - and lots of studious work done. I look forward to being able to... christopher.jones

When talking to Raimonds Simanovskis the other week, I convinced him to sign up to give an OpenWorld Unconference session. Raimonds is the maintainer of the enhanced Oracle Adapter for Rails so this session should be excellent. His talk "Using... christopher.jones