PHP Oracle Web Development book by Packt Publishing

PHP Oracle Web Development is a new book from Packt that helps users combine the power, scalability, and reliability of the Oracle Database with the ease of use, short development time, and high performance of PHP. Written by experienced author, Yuli Vasiliev, this book is built entirely around example code, covering the most popular and up-to-date topics on using PHP in conjunction with Oracle.

When building a PHP/Oracle application, users have two general options. The first is to use an Oracle database just to store data, performing all the operations on that data on the client side; the other is to use the database not only to store data, but also to process it, thus moving data processing to the data.

While building the key business logic of a database-driven PHP application inside the database is always a good idea, users should bear in mind that not all of the databases available today allow you to do. The Oracle database, which offers record-breaking performance, scalability, and reliability, does. The partnership of Oracle and the open-source scripting language PHP is an excellent solution for building high-performance, scalable, and reliable data-driven web applications.

This 100% practical book is crammed full of easy-to-follow examples. It provides all the tools a PHP/Oracle developer needs to take advantage of the winning combination. It addresses the needs of a wide spectrum of PHP/Oracle developers, placing the emphasis on the most up-to-date topics, such as new PHP and Oracle Database features, stored procedure programming, handling transactions, security, caching, web services, and Ajax.

Through numerous examples, this book will show readers how to build simple and efficient PHP applications on top of Oracle, efficiently distributing data processing between the Web/PHP server and Oracle Database server.

Although PHP Oracle Web Development covers only the most popular and up-to-date topic areas on the use of PHP in conjunction with Oracle, the author does not make any assumption about the skill level of the reader. Packed with information in an easy-to-read format, the book is ideal for any PHP developer who deals with Oracle. For more information, please visit:

www.PacktPub.com/PHP-Oracle-Web-Development-XML-Ajax-Open-Source/book

Source: www.linuxpr.com

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eHarmony Weds Oracle 10g

Oracle on Monday announced that eHarmony, a leading online dating and match-making service, is now using the Oracle 10g database to play Cupid to more than 17 million love-starved users.

While the actual transition from Microsoft's SQL Server database software only took an uneventful three hours, the planning, testing and installation took more than 14 months, according to Mark Douglas, eHarmony's vice president of technology.

But the days and weeks preceding those fateful three hours were every bit as nerve-wracking as those awkward, hesitant seconds leading up to a couple's first kiss.

"It went flawlessly, but a lot of our IT people were nervous," Douglas said in an interview with internetnews.com. "Some said they didn't know a lot about databases but it sounded risky. We’re a 24/7 business. We can't just shut our database down for the weekend."

To make it happen, Douglas and his five-person IT crew embarked on the tedious task of scripting custom code that would allow eHarmony to seamlessly transfer data from the SQL Server database to Oracle 10g without any downtime.

The eHarmony site handles more than 400 million page views a month and processes between 400 and 1,200 transactions per second. Douglas wouldn't comment on exactly how much revenue would be lost if the site went down but said it would "a lot more" than a $1,000 a minute.

"The analogy I like to use is that is was like transferring packages from one plane to another while both are in flight," he said. "We had to write a really significant amount of code."

eHarmony, along with competitors such as Yahoo Personals, Match.com, JDate and dozens of other more specialized sites, allows subscribers to build personal profiles, view other subscribers' profiles and access an array of dating services, including a match-making system that connects would-be lovers with others based on their dating preferences. eHarmony, based in Pasadena, Calif., charges $59 a month for the service but does offer long-term contracts at a lower monthly rate.

In the past year, eHarmony's registered user base has surged from around 11 million to more than 17 million, adding an average of 15,000 new daters each day. That kind of growth, Douglas said, couldn't be accommodated on SQL Server.

"There's nothing particularly wrong with SQL," he said. "We just needed functionality that Microsoft doesn't provide and didn't want to write it all ourselves."

Leading up to the live launch, eHarmony tested migrating more than five terabytes of its precious data every day for 100 days in a row. It uses more than 400 servers to process changes to customer profiles, queries for potential matches, searches and new customer orders.

Douglas said the total cost to move eHarmony to Oracle 10g was in the vicinity of $1.5 million. The site's perceived response time—essentially how fast individual pages load—has improved by about 30 percent and the IT department no longer has to schedule planned site outages to perform service operations on the system as it did with the SQL Server software.

According to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association and comScore Networks, Americans in 2005 spent more than $500 million on online personals and dating sites.

For the record, Douglas is married, didn't meet his wife on eHarmony and said the company prohibits employees from using the service.

Author: Larry Barrett

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eRewards Selects Oracle Database Infrastructure for Online Market Research

eRewards, Inc., a provider of online market research, has opted for Oracle Database infrastructure to conduct online market research. eRewards leverages a family of Oracle Database products as the basis for its online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouse systems.

eRewards makes use of Oracle Database 10g to power its program, which rewards members for the time they spend answering online surveys. Participating in the program, members earn e-Rewards currency, which can be redeemed for a variety of rewards including dining, entertainment, travel and retail rewards.

eRewards relies on Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to process the influx of data.

eRewards' Web site runs on OLTP system supported by Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters that facilitate online interaction with eRewards members. The multi-terabyte data warehouse of eRewards also works on Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters. In addition, eRewards leverages the flexibility of Oracle Data Guard to keep its data warehouse up-to-date with the latest information captured by the OLTP system. eRewards has also deployed Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to design its data warehouse and business intelligence systems.

"We evaluated competitive offerings and nothing could match the combination of functionality, performance, manageability and the cost structure offered by Oracle," said Joel Davis, Senior Vice President of Technology, eRewards. "Near real-time synchronization of our data warehouse with our OLTP system enables eRewards to more effectively scale our environment to meet the needs of members, clients, and employees."

Author: Niladri Sekhar Nath @ TMCnet

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