OCI8 provides the most powerful way to interact with Oracle from PHP. Developed exclusively for interacting with Oracle database, OCI8 offers more options than any high‑level database abstraction layer does.
When developing a PHP/Oracle application, you normally start by creating the code responsible for obtaining a database connection. With OCI8, you can choose between three different connecting functions: oci_connect, oci_pconnect, and oci_new_connect. While using oci_connect will be appropriate for most general uses, you should use oci_new_connect instead when it comes to dealing with transactions. When you want to reduce overhead on each subsequent page load, you may use oci_pconnect to obtain a persistent connection that is not closed when the script execution ends.
Once you have obtained a connection, you can start processing the SQL statement. With OCI8, the required steps involved in SQL statement processing include parsing and executing. You perform these steps using oci_parse...