Christopher Jones

I previously blogged about the free developer training day at Oracle HQ next Monday. But now I hear it has giveaways! The raffle at the end of the event will gather all the attendees in the auditorium. The prizes: 1... christopher.jones

John Scoles has just released DBD::Oracle 1.22 for Perl. His release note and change list are at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/1151/dbdoracle-122-released.... christopher.jones

Oracle is running a free workshop at its Headquarters on August 25th. This is a call for developers interested in developing applications in PHP, Ruby/Rails, Java, .Net or even wanting to use Oracle's free SQL Developer tool or learn web... christopher.jones

PHP 4.4.9 is available . This is the terminal release PHP 4. The PHP community gave notice on 13 July 2007 that the end of PHP 4 was 8 August 2008. And so it has come. All software projects have... christopher.jones

The ZendCon and Oracle OpenWorld conferences are back-to-back in September this year. There are Oracle sessions at ZendCon, and PHP sessions at OOW; I'll blog on those later. Both have Unconference sessions: http://www.zendcon.com/ZendCon08/public/wiki/UnCon_Talks http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+OpenWorld+Unconference Your Task: Sign up on the... christopher.jones

Nuno Lopes, on his way from Portugal to Apple HQ via Oregon, stopped in at Oracle HQ to have a chat and give a sneak preview of a talk he's presenting at http://llvm.org/devmtg/ tomorrow: The Zend Engine (the PHP VM)... christopher.jones

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8. In other news, the PHP community has been working hard on updating the Windows build infrastructure. Chatting on IRC this morning, Pierre said... christopher.jones

Lukas Smith has stepped in to help Johannes Schlüter close down the PHP 5.3 release cycle. The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see... christopher.jones

Justin Kestelyn of OTN fame is running a free, interactive Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp on Monday, July 28, 2008 at Oracle in Redwood Shores, California, USA. Justin's been at the forefront of the adoption of new mediums and technology running Oracle's... christopher.jones

The team at Oracle have completed the migration of our blogging platform to Moveable Type. Let me know if you spot any data glitches, e.g. in the sample code. Part II of the change is an upgrade of MT itself,... christopher.jones

Blogs.oracle.com is migrating blogging platforms soon. Apologies in advance for any glitches in RSS feeds.

Vote to have more PHP sessions at Oracle Open World Nomination and voting for "Customer Selected Sessions" at Oracle Open World is still taking place on Oracle Mix. As expected, DB-centric sessions have the early running with most interest. However... christopher.jones

The latest branch of PHP's OCI8 extension is now "Production" on PECL http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 Oracle's Harald Lovvik had the pleasure of making the formal announcement on Friday at Open Nordic. PHP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and... christopher.jones

Nomination and voting for "Customer Selected Sessions" at Oracle Open World is still taking place on Oracle Mix.

As expected, DB-centric sessions have the early running with most interest. However if you want to see PHP more prominent at the conference, a couple of PHP sessions have registered:

https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/32655-php-internet-information-server-and-oracle

https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/26997-ignite-your-oracle-and-php-experience-with-codeigniter

Or you could always nominate your own session. It's like Open World Idol, but you only get one performance.

The latest branch of PHP's OCI8 extension is now "Production" on PECL http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8

Oracle's Harald Lovvik had the pleasure of making the formal announcement on Friday at Open Nordic.

PHP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

See the README in the OCI8 bundle and read the white paper http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/php-scalability-ha-twp.pdf for more information.

A big thanks to all beta testers, community members, early adopters and to Oracle's development team for helping achieve this goal.

PS. blogs.oracle.com is in the midst of migrating to MT (http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2008/06/20). The content freeze was last Friday: I expect this post won't be migrated to the new system.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapecó on June 20." See http://www.phpsc.com.br/?page_id=10&language=pt for the... christopher.jones

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapecó on June 20." See http://www.phpsc.com.br/?page_id=10&language=pt for the schedule.

He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

Mark Harrison, from Pixar Animation Studios, recently announced the first release of "OraPig", which creates Python interfaces for PL/SQL packages. The documentation is a good place to get an overview: http://www.markharrison.net/orapig/ The project itself is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/orapig/... christopher.jones

Mark Harrison, from Pixar Animation Studios, recently announced the first release of "OraPig", which creates Python interfaces for PL/SQL packages. The documentation is a good place to get an overview: http://www.markharrison.net/orapig/

The project itself is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/orapig/

This is a blatent plug for you to attend these conferences, which are coming very soon. Dutch PHP Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 13th & 14th June 2008: http://phpconference.nl/ Open Nordic Conference, Skien, Norway, 19th & 20th June 2008: http://conference.ez.no/eng/Open-Nordic-Conference-2008 If the... christopher.jones