Oracle PHP Magazine: Building Scalable PHP Oracle Applications

Published on 2008-02-20 13:26:15

Often as a developer you find yourself maintaining legacy code that just was not built for the large stresses it is now under. Writing scalable applications should cost no more than non scalable ones, in-fact they can be smaller! And when you are planning your next web application that will take over the world you have to start somewhere. This article should demonstrate techniques for design that allow for horizontal and vertical scaling. In this first part we'll talk about the principles of database abstraction, in the next in the series we will discover more about implementation using PHP's oci8 extensions with example classes for your use.

PHP Strengths

PHP is a fast web scripting language especially when compiled as an apache module, and is an excellent thin web layer that scales well horizontally. PHP and Apache can handle many transactions quickly, compared to a more heavy weight application server such as JBoss, hungry in terms of CPU and memory per request.

Oracle Strengths

Oracle is a robust, high performance transactional DBMS. It can also perform complex data processing through its native PL/SQL language. MySQL achilles heal is its transactional processing capabilities, although ISAM is fast on selects a single update or insert locks the entire table. Increasingly with user interactive and user generated content of the WEB 2.0 era transaction processing is king.

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