Antony just sent an email that he finished commiting the updates to the PHP OCI8 driver and giving a short overview of the bug fixes and improvements.
The OCI8 extension has had a lot of bugs in the past few years, and it became clear that if this extension was to become supportable, it would need a serious face lift and architectural improvement.
I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the extension. This includes Christopher Jones from Oracle who has been very active over the years on bugs.php.net trying to support the Oracle users; the OCI team including Srinath, Luxi, and Shoaib who helped a lot in understanding how to best use the OCI API, how to optimize the driver, and even learnt to read PHP extensions and provided feedback for the code itself, Wez who played a huge role in rearchitecting the extension, and of course Antony, who did all the hard work of implementing the extension, rewriting the documentation, writing the gazillion new tests cases, and putting up with the constant nitpicking for improvements (and of course, stepping up in the past to become the OCI8 maintainer and help with damage control).
I encourage all Oracle users to test the new extension. In addition to resolving the many bugs, it also has some performance improvements, mainly in defaulting to a 10 row prefetch, and by supporting statement caching. Also, please review the new documentation which has been significantly improved.
If you bump into any problems, please email Antony or open a bug report at http://bugs.php.net.
Enjoy!
