Adventures in PHP and Oracle

Recently we have been asked to develop some of our future sites in PHP. Traditionally we have worked in an in house language which fits in nicely with HTML but there is pressure from our clients to use something a little more "available" so that they can customise their sites themselves.

The in house language connects to Oracle and we have a large library of Oracle Packages designed to get our information from the database in a structured way. One thing we do a lot is return data in collections rather than via ref cursors. The problem is that the current version of the Oracle Call Interface doesn't support returning arrays (collections) which have been defined within the header of a package.

This means either rewriting some 500 packages/procedures or adding another layer of complexity to convert the returns into a data type PHP can handle.