[SOLVED] php_oci8 fails because of OCI.DLL error <<<< SOLVED!!!!

[roydude]

Hi,

 

(This might get a little long, but please bear with me - it took a long time to find the problem with this, so I'm posting it all over the place in case someone needs it!!)

 

I've just spent almost an entire week trying to get PHP to load up php_oci8.dll without falling over immediately - the last two days there's been 2 of us looking at this and we finally came across the answer at about 7pm last night!

 

The problem was: type "php.exe" from a command prompt (this is for a data daemon which needs to run in the background - not a web page!). A window would pop up complaining about OCIStmtPrepare2, saying it could not be located in OCI.dll, and the command prompt would return the message that the "specified procedure could not be found".

 

NOTE:

• This is not a web server / IIS / Apache issue because we're running from the command line (the pc we finally got this working on doesn't even have a web server on it!)!!
  
• We already had Oracle client 10g installed (company standard installation, which works with TOAD, SQLPlus etc... on 10g databases)
  

 

After around 40 man-hours of installing different versions of php, downloading different versions of OCI.DLL, trawling through forums and websites we finally came across a page that suggested our Oracle 10g client version was incompatible!!

 

To check this, we installed Oracle Instant Client (which is Oracle11) on a different pc, plus PHP 5.2.8. Uncommented the php_oci8.dll and just typed "php.exe" from the command line - it worked!!! ... well, it didn't fail! ;o) ....

 

So in a nutshell, we've currently got it working with:

[*]PHP 5.2.8 with the stupidly named php_oci8.dll uncommented, and

[*]Oracle 11 client.

 

Now we need to see if the Oracle 11 client will talk to our 10g databases, else we'll need to find a newer version of Oracle 10g client!