Wednesday, December 19. 2007PHP, Oracle and SELinux
The other day, in my review of PHP Oracle Web Development, I mentioned that I was having problems enabling the oracle extension on Fedora 8. I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results. I assume that the steps I went through to get it working are the same for that version as well (other than the different directory). Anyways, the issue was a bit strange. When trying to run the configure script, I would receive the error:
cannot compute sizeof char* This would only happen when the oracle extension (ext/oci8 or ext/pdo-oci) was enabled. So I started poking around the config.log and the oracle m4 file. The first thing I noticed was that libaio was missing. Having become so used to rpms detailing their dependencies (and the intstant client installing without issue), I hadn't realized that the instant client needed this lib. After a quick, yum install libaio, I tried again, yet still hit the same issue. Continue reading "PHP, Oracle and SELinux" Monday, December 17. 2007Book Review: PHP Oracle Web Development
The good folks from Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a few books to review and I've been a little lax posting a review, so over the next few days I hope to have them all up. Overall I would have to say that PHP Oracle Web Development is a good book for a PHP developer needing to get up to speed quickly working with an Oracle database. I've worked with Oracle before using other languages, but never with PHP. I found the chapters progressed through the various topics in a logical and straightforward manner. It was easily to follow along, of course coding as you go, and easy to understand what was going on.
There were some features that, prior to this, I hadn't used before, such as their native XML support. Lately, I have been using DB2 and XQuery and was both surprised and glad to find the book cover some of this. Again, easy to understand and follow. After about 15 minutes, I was doing all sorts of crazy XML operations within Oracle. The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment. This is definitely a minor nit, but something that was a bit frustrating until I got it all working. The book tends to favor a Windows installation, which usually is simple anyways. I decided, however, to install on my linux box. The missing step came when I was trying to configure the oci8 extension in PHP. I was not using the instant client and had not setup the environment, so things weren't found. After checking the oci8 config.m4 in PHP, I found it was looking for ORACLE_HOME. A little searching and I found that all I needed was to execute a shell command (included in the Oracle install) to have them properly setup: /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh After that, install went smoothly. Now, the only other issue I am having is trying to configure PHP to work on my Fedora 8 system using the 11.1 instant client. The configure script (using PHP 5.2 from CVS that does support this Oracle version) doesn't like it for some reason. Something to work on another day. All in all, I would definitely recommend this book, PHP Oracle Web Development, to a PHP developer needing to learn or at least have a reference book on integrating with Oracle. Updated 12/19/2007: I finally resolved the instant client issue on Fedora 8. Also fixed my typos :/ Monday, December 10. 2007Library Updates and Other Dealings
Life and work have been eating up all my time, so I have had no time to write anything about what's been going on. I finally decided to take a break from work, sit down and try to catch up with things.
Although busy, I have been updating my libraries; adding deatures, fixing bugs and trying to get some structure going. The libraries are used by a good number of projects, so I figured it was about time to make some of the changes known. First off, I started tracking versions and keeping changelogs for the different libraries (Only those that have changed since I started version tracking have changelogs right now). The libraries can all be found on my Source Code page. As for some of the specific changes.... Continue reading "Library Updates and Other Dealings"
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