Book Image

PHP Oracle Web Development: Data processing, Security, Caching, XML, Web Services, and Ajax

By : Yuli Vasiliev
Book Image

PHP Oracle Web Development: Data processing, Security, Caching, XML, Web Services, and Ajax

By: Yuli Vasiliev

Overview of this book

Oracle Database gets high marks for performance, reliability, and scalability. Building and deploying your PHP applications on Oracle Database enables you to combine the power and robustness of Oracle and the ease of use, short development time, and high performance of PHP. When used in a complementary way, PHP and Oracle allow you to build high-performance, scalable, and reliable data-driven Web applications with a minimum of effort.When building a PHP/Oracle application, you have two general options. The first is to use an Oracle database just to store data, performing all the operations on that data on the client side; the other is to use the database not only to store data, but also to process it, thus moving data processing to the data. While building the key business logic of a database-driven PHP application inside the database is always a good idea, you should bear in mind that not all of the databases available today allow you to do. The Oracle database, which offers record-breaking performance, scalability, and reliability, does. The partnership of Oracle and the open-source scripting language PHP is an excellent solution for building high-performance, scalable, and reliable data-driven web applications.This 100% practical book is crammed full of easy-to-follow examples. It provides all the tools a PHP/Oracle developer needs to take advantage of the winning combination. It addresses the needs of a wide spectrum of PHP/Oracle developers, placing the emphasis on the most up-to-date topics, such as new PHP and Oracle Database features, stored procedure programming, handling transactions, security, caching, web services, and Ajax.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
PHP Oracle Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 2. PHP and Oracle Connection

The sample in Chapter 1 represents a simple example of how the OCI8 functions can be used to interact with Oracle. However, besides OCI8, there are some other ways for Oracle and PHP to interact with each other. For example, you may choose from a number of open-source libraries such as PEAR DB and ADOdb, which provide a level of data abstraction. You might also create a set of your own PHP functions on top of the OCI8 extension to encapsulate its low-level functionality.

However, it is important to realize that using another level of data abstraction can simplify the development process, but using direct database calls made through the OCI8 functions allows you to take full advantage of the Oracle database features and build faster and more reliable applications. That is why, in the examples throughout this book, the OCI8 extension is used as the primary way to communicate with an Oracle database.

This chapter covers the basics of using the PHP OCI8 extension...