the information you gave me in the previous comment already helped to fix a few things. I will post a follow-up once I am satisfied with the setup.

Also, I understand that the post might be somewhat offending for all those who put hard labour in development of Oracle, and in PHP integration. I didn’t mean it this way. It was written after a week of frustrating trial and error, so it’s rather emotional.

As I said, I will post a follow-up once the issues are resolved and my head is clear. :)

thanks a lot for stopping by and sharing the information. Especially for the book link. After a brief look it seems useful. I’ll read it through in the next few days.

As for the direct queries – this needs some experimentation and changes on the code that I don’t have a lot of control over, but we’ll try to work something out, even if just to test it. Thanks for the idea. I’ll post more on the progress later.

The binding issue that I mentioned wasn’t about the binding per se, but rather about specifying variable types. It seems excessive, at least in non-typed programming language, such as PHP.

About the Instant Client – I’m sure that I built OCI8 with Instant Client, because otherwise I can’t even get it compiled. Is there any way to check if all that I need is in or not? How can I figure out if those Oracle+Zend performance improvements are utilized on my machine?

For your build problem it sounds like you didn’t pass the Instant Client path name to ‘configure’

Queries in SQL are generally faster than returning REF CURSORs from PL/SQL packages because they can use prefetching which is all handled in the Oracle libraries under PHP OCI8. The row-by-row you see in OCI8 C code is just fetching from a cache of rows. See oci8.default_prefetch. If your DB is “remote”, than this will have a big performance impact.

Binding every variable you declare as a bind variable would be logical.

Your problem with “Failed to retreive the error message” generally only happens if you are using an ORACLE_HOME-style install. Are you sure you are using Instant Client?

Here’s one reference that may help: http://www.oracle.com/tec...un.....manual.pdf

can you share a bit more info about your setup please? Which version of PHP, oci8, and Oracle are you using? How did you get it running (pre-packaged or compiled), etc.

As for our setup, an interesting thing I forgot to mention is that any non-PHP implementation is much faster with all other variables being the same (same Oracle, same hosts, same functionality). Also, Oracle itself is pretty fast – we tested the same queries locally and from other interfaces (C++).

We are using CodeIgniter as the PHP framework, and there are no restrictions on NEEDING to use PL/SQL. You can run standard SQL against Oracle with no issues, but you have the ability to run PL/SQL as well.

You should look into using CodeIgniter against Oracle, and I think you might have a different opinion.