php and oracle

[afhouston]

I'm in charge of designing a dynamic website for a university organization. I barely understand PHP and I was hoping I could use the PHP/mySQL tutorials to assist.

However, the server that the organization uses runs Oracle. Is Oracle a lot harder to integrate with PHP than mySQL? Any good resources out there that could help a beginner in this area.

Thanks.

[matto]

yes ... there are some issues with oracle.

• you should use a database abstraction library because the steps of doing a query in oracle are a bit different. for instance, you have to do a "parse" of the statement before executing it ...
  http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php

• if you get a lot of zombies (dead oracle processes) on the server, be sure php has been compiled with --enable-sigchilds.

I recommend my "db abstraction library for 4 databases" which you can download in phpbuilder's code gallery. if you don't want to incorporate it, you can still use it as a reference concerning the oracle way of db accessing.