PHP, Oracle and Cognitive Dissonance

It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between Larry "Ninja" Ellison's personal plaything, aka Oracle, and the hacker's scripting tape-duct duct-tape of choice, PHP. And yet the miracle that is open source is able to bring even these polar opposites together in an act of seamless connectivity:

Continuing to deliver on its long-standing commitment to the Open Source community, Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.

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The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems.

(Via Alan Lord.)