Drupal under ORACLE
The OraDrup project was set up in April 2006 to bring the Drupal 4.7.x content management system into the world of the ORACLE DBMS. This was chosen because "it was there" and to date, this lofty aim appears to have stifled those brave enough to attempt it, which seems a bit of a shame.
In my own opinion, this is not a particularly elegant solution to the problem of getting Drupal to dovetail with ORACLE (or should that be the other way round?) but the constraints were numerous, including Drupal's current natural inclination to favour MySQL. With that in mind, this is a reasonably decent attempt to achieve the goal in as painless (for the Drupal administrator) a way as possible.
Until such time as when the engine within the Starship Drupal is flexible enough to run on any brand of database fuel, we must make do with an interim solution.
At the time of writing, all Drupal 4.7.3 core modules that were within the scope of the project have been successfully demonstrated to work with ORACLE 9i and ORACLE 10g under both PHP4 and PHP5.
The project's deliverables are available here for download. If it inspires some thoughts which you'd like to share, feel free to provide feedback - it would very much be appreciated.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| oradrup-1.0.tgz | 55.65 KB |
Recent versions of the OCI8 library, particularly the version bundled with PHP 5.1.5 and 5.1.6, have been observed to be very problematic with respect to LOB processing and to stability. It may be necessary to refresh the bundled copy with one taken from the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL). The same has been experienced with PHP 5.1.6 under the Windows platform. In that particular case, a copy of php_oci8.dll taken from the very recent Zend Core for ORACLE 1.5 has been verified as a suitable substitute.