XpertDeploy is a Developer Application Deployment Tool that have just released today. A solution that helps developers and DB administrators to improve their application deployment and eliminiate wasted time. Below the press release :

SQL Interpreter Provides Uniform Method for Application Deployment

Georgetown, TX - April 17, 2008 - XpertDeploy, a leading provider of database developer and administrator productivity solutions, announced today the general availability of XpertDeploy™ For Oracle®.

"Tasks associated with deploying updates to our application or with a new application release costs our team 16 - 20 hours of unproductive time per month," said Tom Beggs, Vice President of Information Technology for a logistics software provider. "By using XpertDeploy™ For Oracle®, that wasted time was reduced to just 4 hours, saving us 12 - 16 hours. The system paid for itself the first month".

Continue reading "XpertDeploy For Oracle® Increases Productivity Of Developers Up To 800%" »

Posted by Hatem at 6:48 AM to Tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apress published on August 2007 a great book on PHP and oracle by W. Jason Gilmore, and Bob Bryla. The book, with its 763 pages and 40 chapters, include a full coverage on working with PHP and oracle from novice to professional as the book title indicates. Since I'm working everyday with PHP and Oracle, I spent more time than usual to finish reading the entire book - but I defintely enjoy it.

Getting started with PHP

The first three chapters include an introduction to PHP from the programming language history, to the differences between different version of PHP 4,5 and 6, then the general language features, and why is it an excellent choice for Oracle database. Many Oracle developers don't consider the choice of PHP as a good one, or still confused between using .Net, Java, PHP or other web solutions. Getting your hands on this book will defenitely answer a lot of questions, and you can see by yourself if developing PHP and Oracle web applications is suitable for your needs.

The Second chapter is about configuring your environment on Linux and Windows platform. So you have the choice here for working on your favorite envrionment and you can make it fit with the production server. The book provides very general directives to configure PHP and Apache. No mention of Oracle until here, not even the oracle and oci extensions, or the pdo for PHP5 and later. Oracle is introduced at the chapter 26, so you probably have to jump there if you want to have the entire environment ready. What's interesting in chapter two is the recommendation for a code editor - I personaly use Notepad++ - and how to choose a hosting provider. Practical information that you need to know, especially for novice users.

In the Third chapter you will learn the PHP basics : how to create a basic web page, print dynamic content, PHP datatypes, strings, loop structures, file inclusion ... etc. All the necessary small tips that you need to know to get started. This is probably the best part of the book for beginners, because it explains clearly the PHP language, and help to get started creating small scripts before moving into the development of large web applications with oracle.

Continue reading "Beginning PHP and Oracle from Novice to Professional Reviewed" »

Posted by Hatem at 6:41 AM to Books | Oracle 10g | PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Often as a developer you find yourself maintaining legacy code that just was not built for the large stresses it is now under. Writing scalable applications should cost no more than non scalable ones, in-fact they can be smaller! And when you are planning your next web application that will take over the world you have to start somewhere. This article should demonstrate techniques for design that allow for horizontal and vertical scaling. In this first part we'll talk about the principles of database abstraction, in the next in the series we will discover more about implementation using PHP's oci8 extensions with example classes for your use.

PHP Strengths

PHP is a fast web scripting language especially when compiled as an apache module, and is an excellent thin web layer that scales well horizontally. PHP and Apache can handle many transactions quickly, compared to a more heavy weight application server such as JBoss, hungry in terms of CPU and memory per request.

Oracle Strengths

Oracle is a robust, high performance transactional DBMS. It can also perform complex data processing through its native PL/SQL language. MySQL achilles heal is its transactional processing capabilities, although ISAM is fast on selects a single update or insert locks the entire table. Increasingly with user interactive and user generated content of the WEB 2.0 era transaction processing is king.

Continue reading "Building Scalable PHP Oracle Applications - Part One" »

Posted by Hatem at 1:26 PM to Articles | PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oracle have just released a set of PHP RPMs for Oracle which include OCI8 and Oracle PDO driver, as well as many other PHP extensions. I think this is great, even it's for development testing only and not supported by Oracle. The RPMs are based on PHP 5.2.3, according to the blog post by Alison Holloway from Oracle.

RPMs can be downloaded from http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/, to install the PHP OCI8 you will need to install the Oracle's free Instant Client Basic package and PHP's php-pdo package :

1- as root run :

rpm -ivh php-common-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm php-cli-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm php-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm

2- Download oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.3-1.i386.rpm and install it

rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.3-1.i386.rpm

3- Install PHP's PDO extension :

rpm -ivh php-pdo-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm

4- Install PHP's Oracle OCI8 and PDO_OCI extensions :

rpm -ivh php-oci8-5.2.3-1.i386.rpm 

Posted by Hatem at 3:54 PM to PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Christopher Jones posted an excellent step by step howto upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on Linux. Pretty useful if you want to migrate to PHP5 for example with the release 3 or Oracle 10g. Personally my big worries is not with Linux, but with Sun Solaris, because I have here a quite old server with some funny limitations like the command line to type the PHP configure, and an old oracle version. Sincerely I can't wait to move everything to linux and update oracle, and stop facing everyday old systems limitations.

The technical problem faced with building PHP is that the Oracle libraries for AS do not include header files. This can be overcome by linking PHP with Oracle Instant Client but care needs to be taken so that AS itself does not use the Instant Client libraries. Otherwise you will get errors or unpredictable behavior.

Posted by Hatem at 5:40 AM to Oracle 10g | PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Jones and Alison Holloway released today version 1.4 of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual[PDF]. An excellent reference for the PHP Oracle developper in 17 chapters and 195 pages. The e-Book cover different issues for installing PHP, Oracle with the different extensions available and connecting them to each other. You can find also how to tune connections by changing OCI8 calls, the network configuration and by tuning the database. More advanced topics are covered such using PL/SQL with OCI8, using large objects in OCI8, using XML, globalization, and a very short chapter but consistent about tracing OCI8 internals. Lots of changes have been made in this release including :

• Updated the versions of software in the install steps. Show how to use the Windows MSI installer. Added a section on upgrading OCI8 in PHP4. Added a section on enabling PDO.
• Updated the SQL Developer section (thanks to Sue Harper).
• Improved and extended the examples. Many more can now be cut-and-pasted and run standalone.
• Added new connection performance tips.
• Show how to retrieve PL/SQL "success with information" errors.
• Added a section on testing.
• Added a chapter mapping PHP 4 to PHP 5 function names.
• Added a chapter on mapping ora_* to oci_* function names

Posted by Hatem at 7:06 AM to Books | PHP | Permalink | Comments (0)