Hello all. This topic serves as both an announcement and a call for volunteers.

After seeing numerous calls and wishes for Drupal to be seen to run with an ORACLE back end, I decided to have a bash at the task. A few months ago I got stuck in and, after some work, was finally pleased to see Core Drupal 4.7 and the ORACLE 9i/10g platform cuddling up to each other. Having spent a fair amount of time in the testing phase, I found the results to be favourable and was very pleasantly surprised to see that, performance-wise, it wasn't being left to eat the dust left behind by a similar Drupal installation running under MySQL. I have written a few paragraphs about my thoughts here.

I would now like to move things along to the next stage and enlist the help of some willing Drupal users who are both comfortable with ORACLE and who would like to have a go at running Drupal on an ORACLE database. A single person can test Drupal's many features for correctness only so much.

If this proves to be a successful first rung on the ladder, my hope is that, with the coming together of ORACLE and Drupal, some organisations with rather strict database policies may at last be able to gain access to the latter; and that ORACLE Real Application Cluster technology becomes an option for a highly scalable Drupal implementation. It certainly makes for interesting times.

I have primarily been working under Linux and ORACLE 9i/10g but have also managed to do some limited testing under Windows 2000 and ORACLE 10g Express Edition. Much of that time was spent trying to get PHP with the OCI8 extension to work properly (but that's another story).
By the way, be aware of this as it may also happen to you - and under Linux too! I have found recent releases of OCI8 to be rather problematic during these last few months.

With that, it remains to say that the software is available from my site where you can also read about some of the frustrations encountered during this journey. The link to my site can be found in my profile here, under the personal information section.

Hoping to hear from some people soon.

Thanks.

Drupal version: Drupal 4.7.x