Almost every data-driven application relies on some form of hierarchical data of varying complexity: products in categories, messages in folders, employees in departments. Of course, you will need to display this data at some point to yield a catalog, inbox, or organization chart. With Oracle's vendor-specific SQL extensions and PHP's uncanny knack for handling arrays, you can retrieve and display a tree that is inherently highly optimized in a way that's concise and easy to maintain.
Because the queries and functions discussed here will be less process-intensive and create more readable code, this HowTo is useful at implementation time as well as when refactoring existing code. If your data has tree-like data shapes (currently displayed or yet to be tapped for their value), this HowTo will be valuable. Users of the latest and greatest RDBMS are in luck as new features make some tricky hierarchical tasks even easier, although versions since Oracle8i have the basic underlying functionality.
While the process of storing and retrieving data is at the heart of any dynamic Web site, professional applications require more thought and effort than these simple transactions imply. A crucial but easily overlooked aspect of data storage is protecting sensitive information—from passwords, to credit cards, to social security numbers—using encryption. Thus an understanding as to what encryption techniques are available in Oracle (via a PHP interface), and how best to use them, is important for all Web developers.
No "magic bullet" is available for encryption, however. Rather, a number of options are available, each differing in security level, programming complexity, and performance overhead. (Usually an inverse relationship exists between security and performance). Before getting into the details, you should also realize that security does not reflect a binary state—"secure" or "not secure"—but rather a spectrum along which each application should be placed as the needs and context demand.
In this HowTo, you'll get a brief introduction to the necessary tools, and even get some specific code, for improving the security of your data.
Many developers have been won over by the elegance and efficiency of PHP5's implementation of object-orientation, and are equally drawn to the power and robustness of the world's foremost database, Oracle. However, taking the next logical step—storing PHP objects in your database for Web application development—can be intimidating.
In this HowTo, you will learn how to store and retrieve PHP5 objects as objects in an Oracle Database via an object persistence layer (available in the OracleDatabaseObject package download). This technique allows any Oracle developer to take the final step toward full object-orientation in their Web applications—and hence toward a renewed focus on application logic, rather than messy SQL and coding.
Since the early days PHP has been able to talk to Oracle—but it wasn't easy. Deploying PHP with Oracle was complicated at best, requiring developers and administrators to find, download, compile, link and configure multiple applications and packages. Unfortunately, this fact was counterintuitive for PHP users, as PHP has always been known for rapid deployment and quick time to market, not cumbersome processes better left to the C curmudgeons.
Thanks to the latest collaborative effort between Oracle and Zend, those days are history. Zend Core for Oracle allows developers to install, deploy, and configure PHP and Oracle just about as quickly and painlessly as possible. In this final installment of the DeployPHP series, you'll learn how that process works.
A stored procedure workout with Oracle and PHP
How to manage many-to-many relationships reliably using the power of the Oracle Database.
Hitting the 4,000-byte limit? Enter LOBs...
Improve the speed and security of your Oracle-driven PHP applications by binding variables.
Both PHP and Oracle provide functionality manipulating dates and times. Which to use and when?
An introduction to the use of the MDB2 database abstraction layer with Oracle, with simple as well as advanced examples.
