My system is set up as follows:
Pentium 166, 32Mb DRAM
Redhat Linux 6.0
Oracle Server Standard 8.0.5
Apache 1.3.6-7 
PHP 3.0.14
PHPlib - 7.2

SYMPTOMS
Most of the testing is done with PHPlib 7.2.  Partly because this is what I want to use, but also because it makes writing the test scripts much quicker.
I have verified that the problems are with the underlying PHP functions, not PHPlib.
sqlplus seems to have no trouble with any function either local or remote.

Without PHPlib
1.  Using the example script given in the PHP reference manual under OCIlogon, table insertion and deletion, and row insertion work correctly.  The select_data function returns nothing.  The same query run in sqlplus on the same data works.

Using PHPlib one has the choice by changing one line in prepend.php3 to swap between oracle functions and oci8 functions.
Using oci8 functions most of the PHPlib demo works.  Problems can be seen accessing showoff.php3.  After authentication, which requires access to the data in the Oracle database and works a page is sent containing the lines:

>active_sessions data
>
>Only the newest ten session entries are shown:
>Ten more entries are shown (if present):
>End of your active_sessions data
There should be more between the last two lines.  This appears to be same problem as in the OCIlogon example script.  The ociparse/ociexecute function returns no data.

Using the same showoff.php3 page using the oaracle functions via PHPlib gives these lines at the same place in the output:
>active_sessions data
>
>Only the newest ten session entries are shown:
>  table
>              name
>                           type
>                                 len
>                                      flags
>                                             format
>                                                     index
>                                                            >.chars
>        Example_Session
>        Example_Session

>Ten more entries are shown (if present):

> Warning: Invalid cursor index 4 in db_oracle.inc on line 143

> Warning: Invalid cursor index 4 in db_oracle.inc on line 150

> Warning: Bad Oracle connection number (4) in db_oracle.inc on line 150

> Warning: Invalid cursor index 4 in db_oracle.inc on line 157

> Warning: Bad Oracle connection number (4) in db_oracle.inc on line 157
>End of your active_sessions data
(the garbage stepping down the page is really an HTML table containing data from the database about previous sessions.
The oracle functions also give occasional can't locate resource errors from Net8.

These are some of the things I have tried without making ANY difference whatsoever to the system behaviour described above.
1.Deinstalled and deleted all Oracle files and reinstalled.
2.Used both local and remote (8.0.4 on DEC UNIX) databases.
3.Recompiled the php module changing various configure flags except --with-oracle.

All the PHPlib demos work perfectly with a local MySQL database.
I will now try older versions of PHP.
Can anybody give me version numbers for a combination of Linux or UNIX/Oracle/Apache/PHP which is known to work or at least run the PHPlib demo?

Bill Northcott
School of Banking and Finance
University of New South Wales