I have been exploring ZF to implement for my client and found a few
interesting things that I thought might be of interest to others using
the Oracle oci8 driver. While not really "broken", the support for the
Oracle oci8 driver does appear to be missing a few useful / convenient
features:
The Zend_Db_Oracle driver ignores the 'host' parameter. This is only an
issue when PHP is compiled with Oracles instant client which need not
use TNS. For instance the following $dsn throws the following exception
"TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified"
Fails:
$dsn = array(
'host' =>'myhost',
'username' => 'zend',
'password' => 'zend',
'dbname' => 'xe',
'options' => $options
);
This is not surprising since the instant client does not use TNS as
stated. To get this to work you need to prepend the 'dbname' parameter
with the host name, which although easy to do is not very intuitive.
Works:
$dsn = array(
'host' => 'totally ignored',
'username' => 'zend',
'password' => 'zend',
'dbname' => 'myhost/xe',
'options' => $options
);
Perhaps this could be fixed in the next minor release? It would be
backward compatible, and it would support the claim that Zend Core for
Oracle is optimized for "Oracle Database 10g client libraries". Support
for different ports (other than the default 1521) in the options array
would also be nice to have. (Creole for example supports both these
features)
Zend_Db_Statement_Oracle
This class states that it does not support case folding due to a
limitation of the Oci8 driver. The driver may not support case folding,
but after a quick review of the code I was curious as to why this was
not emulated, at least for results being returned as an associative
array (objects would not be much of a stretch either)? This would be a
great feature to have and save those looking for this feature from
having to call the array_change_key_case() function on every row
returned :-)
Finally, curiosity has me pondering why the name of the public method
Zend_Db_Statement_Oracle::_execute() is public. Should this not be a
protected method since Zend_Db_Statement_Oracle::_prepare() is protected
and neither appear to be designed to be called from a different scope?
Craig Duncan
