PHP provides built in functions to access just about every database that exists, including Oracle.? In the following pages, we will illustrate how to use these built in functions to communicate with an Oracle database.

There are two APIs that you can use to connect to an Oracle database.? The normal Oracle functions (ORA) and the Oracle 8 Call-Interface functions (OCI8).? The latter can only be used with the Oracle 7 and 8 databases.? OCI8 should be used whenever possible since it is optimized and provides more options.? We will showcase both, in every step.

This article, assumes Oracle and PHP are setup correctly.? They both have excellent documentation on how to do this.