connect to oracle

Let say we need to connect to Oracle DB form our windows (64 bit) php server. Linux fan boy would think tkat apt-get php module (on windows most modules are shipped with php installation ) and uncomment form php.ini would do the trick - but not with windows and oracle.

uncomment this line


extension=c:/php54/ext/php_oci8_11g.dll  ; Use with Oracle 11gR2 Instant Client

will probably give u some sort of error

[Fri May 25 09:09:03 2012] [error] [client 192.168.1.194] PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'c:/php54/ext/php_oci8_11g.dll' - %1 is not a valid Win32 application.\r

due fact this extension needs oracle client to be installed as well. So next step would be installing of proper (32bit!) oracle client form http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/winsoft-085727.html (i usually go for smallest package in this case *Instant Client Package - Basic Lite: Smaller version of the Basic, with only English error messages and Unicode, ASCII, and Western European character set support (10.2 only) )

After that we need to put the installation folder to path variable

After apache  restart phpinfo() should output some oci output

The following example will test the connection and do some trivial query

<?php
$c = oci_connect('*username*', '*password*', '//192.168.1.113:1521/ORCL');
$sql  = "SELECT ID, USERNAME FROM USERS";
$stmt = oci_parse($c, $sql);
oci_execute($stmt, OCI_DEFAULT);

 while ($row = oci_fetch_array($stmt, OCI_ASSOC)) {
    print_r($row);
}