Connecting to Oracle on another Server

SurgeProto

I need to make a connection between PHP (running on a linux system) and another database server (windows) running Oracle. I'm not familiar with Oracle at all, and while I've read the documentation on this subject, all of the connection functions seem to assume oracle is installed on the same server.

I read something about setting the database up under windows as a system DSN and connecting via ODBC. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in this and how they solved the connection. Thanks in advance.

Sxooter

I'm used to connecting to Oracle remotely under linux. What I did was download the "instant client" or something like that. It's the small one, and php can compile against it or the full oracle client. They're a little different. After that, if you're doing it my way, you'll need a tnsnames.ora file. Here's a short script that works in my machine:

<?php
putenv("TNS_ADMIN=/u01/app/oracle/product/orcl10gc/network/admin/");
putenv("ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/orcl10gc/");
$oconn = oci_connect("reporting","PWD","DBID");
$query = "select * from schema.table order by field";
$res = oci_parse($oconn,$query);
usleep(100);
if (oci_execute($res)){
        usleep(100);
        print "<TABLE border \"1\">";
        $first = 0;
        while ($row = @oci_fetch_assoc($res)){
                if (!$first){
                        $first = 1;
                        print "<TR><TH>";
                        print implode("</TH><TH>",array_keys($row));
                        print "</TH></TR>\n";
                }
                print "<TR><TD>";
                print @implode("</TD><TD>",array_values($row));
                print "</TD></TR>\n";
        }
        print "</TABLE>";
}