• PHP is free software and Oracle is strictly proprietary. Oracle will do little to help the free community around the PHP codebase. No matter what you do, you'll have to cross this war of religions somewhere along the ride.
• PECL OCI8 code is about 8 years old, and a handful of people with brave souls are still struggling with crashers, leaks and incorrect behavior. I have full respect in what they are doing, I know it needs to be done, but they desperately need a lot more help.
• Oracle database is multiple decades old as well, so it surely has a trunk full of old dirt, and I guess that's confusing developers integrating it with third-party software, like PHP.
• Oracle does not provide enough documentation and examples available for public use of C libraries of OCI, this alone limits the contribution PECL-OCI8 module might have received if at least the OCI protocol specs were publicly available, let alone the sources of the client library.
• Oracle database is usually under heavy load, so is PHP when used together. Experienced developers know that race conditions, locking issues and even memory leaks are a lot more easier to observe under heavy system loads. You'll most certainly experience odd behavior of PECL-OCI8 code if your database or website is going to work under heavy load.
• Oracle is expensive, and in my opinion about 60% of the user base doesn't really need it. You don't have to finance Larry's big toys.

If you ask for my advice: don't. Go get yourself a breath of fresh air.

We at Parkyeri have been developing solutions and services, mostly for GSM network providers around middle-east, that rely on PostgreSQL and we're a happy user of it. I have been using it in many projects over last few years right after I switched over my desktop to Linux from Windows. I was a happy InterBase (now you can safely call it FirebirdSQL) user and I was in search of a good replacement for it when I stumbled upon PostgreSQL. Yes, there was something called MySQL and they said it was fast, but one swallow doesn't make it my favorite database, you know. MySQL was only a bit better compared to raw filesystem storage because it allowed data access via SQL. Well well, it should be optional IMO, but that's another story.

At Parkyeri, we have some business with Oracle too. So I believe I'll be blogging about things that would make PostgreSQL #1 choice for anyone and I'll be devoting as much time as I can to the community to achieve that goal, as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, have fun with the next entry :)