Oracle Contributes Breakthrough PHP Code to Open Source Community

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Continuing to deliver on its long-standing commitment to the Open Source community, 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(R) 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.

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"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."

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.

"As the fifth largest US social networking property, Community Connect Inc. expects significant performance and scalability benefits from Oracle's PHP driver contribution," said Michael Montero, Chief Technology Officer of Community Connect Inc. "By developing enhanced capabilities and contributing code, Oracle continues to make PHP a good choice for all types of enterprise applications."

For more than three years, Oracle has been working to deliver enterprise capabilities to PHP developers, including collaboration with Zend Technologies on the OCI8 database driver for PHP and "Zend Core for Oracle," a pre-built stack with a PHP 5 distribution and Oracle Database client libraries. "Zend Core for Oracle" makes it easier to develop and deploy applications on a robust, scalable and reliable infrastructure.

"Zend is excited about Oracle's latest open source contribution and the benefits the new PHP OCI8 driver will bring to the PHP community," said Andi Gutmans, Co-Founder & Co-Chief Technology Officer, Zend Technologies. "With the enhanced driver, PHP developers, as well as architects and DBAs, will benefit from breakthrough scalability and high availability and existing PHP applications can leverage these benefits without changing application code."

For more information about this Oracle open source contribution and to download the preview release of the PHP OCI8 driver, visit: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php. Terms, conditions, and restrictions may apply.

Oracle and Open Source

A long-standing key contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is committed to developing, supporting, and promoting Open Source. Oracle has been, and continues to be, committed to offering choice, flexibility, and a lower cost of computing for end users. By investing significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing and supporting open source technologies such as Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, and InnoDB, Oracle is clearly embracing and offering open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment. Today, many customers are using Oracle and supported open source technologies in mission-critical environments to help them reap the benefits of lower costs, easier manageability, higher availability, and reliability along with performance and scalability advantages.

For more information about Oracle's contributions to Linux and open source, visit http://oss.oracle.com/.

About Oracle

Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

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