NYCPHP Meetup

[Mike Naberezny]

Andrew Yochum wrote:
> If I'm not mistaken, Zend Core for Oracle does not include Oracle
> itself, only the extension & client libs....

It's important to understand that Zend Core is actually more than just 
libraries.  Core is actually a PHP distribution from Zend, analogous to how 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution from Red Hat.

You wouldn't download PHP from php.net and then install Core on top of it. 
You'd just install Zend Core and that would give you PHP with Oracle or DB2 
support.  You have a database, then install Core, and you end up with a 
complete system.

The difference here is that Core follows a different release cycle than 
mainstream PHP.  It is actually built separately by Zend and is always tested 
against the bundled database libraries.

Similar to how the major Linux distributions work, Core doesn't contain all 
the bleeding-edge features of PHP 5.1.2.  However, the newer features are 
merged in as part of the release cycle after they are QA'ed against the rest 
of the Core distribution.  The aim of Zend Core is to provide a version of PHP 
for use with Oracle or DB2 that is stable and supported.

Mike