Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, has announced an updated version of Zend Core for Oracle, which supports businesses using PHP for mission-critical Web applications by delivering a reliable, high performance, easy-to-install PHP development and production environment fully integrated with the Oracle  Database 10g.The new release is validated with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, including the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE).

Oracle Database XE is a starter edition of Oracle’s world-class database that is free to download and free for development, deployment and distribution. It’s ideal for database developers and delivers the enterprise-class functionality, including performance, reliability and security for which Oracle is known. Built on the same code base as Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Database XE offers a virtually seamless upgrade path to the entire family of Oracle Databases. 

Oracle Database XE delivers a free, entry-level database with all of the enterprise-level functionality that PHP developers need to develop robust and scalable applications,” said Monica Kumar, director of product marketing, Oracle. “With Oracle Database XE, not only do developers gain access to a powerful, industry leading database at no cost, but they also get an easy upgrade path to other Oracle database editions as their business needs change. Together with Zend Core for Oracle, Oracle Database XE offers a superior development environment for PHP developers.” 

In addition to validation of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, the update to Zend Core for Oracle has enhanced support for Oracle Procedural Language for SQL (PL/SQL) collection types, giving significantly improved performance. Developers can access PL/SQL directly from PHP in a single, fully integrated environment.