MacLochlainns Weblog

This answers “How you connect PHP programs to an Oracle 12c multitenant database. This shows you how to connect your PHP programs to a user-defined Container Database (CDB) and Pluggable Database (PDB). It presupposes you know how to provision a PDB, and configure your Oracle listener.ora and tnsnames.ora files.

CDB Connection:

This assumes you already created a user-defined c##plsql CDB user, and granted an appropriate role or set of privileges to the user. Assuming the demonstration database Oracle TNS Service Name of orcl, you would test your connection with this script:

<?php
  // Attempt to connect to your database.
  $c = @oci_connect("video", "video", "localhost/orcl");
  if (!$c) {
    print "Sorry! The connection to the database failed. Please try again later.";
    die();
  }
  else {
    print "Congrats! You've connected to an Oracle database!";
    oci_close($c);
  }
?>

PDB Connection:

This assumes you already created a user-defined videodb PDB, and video user in the PDB, and granted an appropriate role or set of privileges to the video user. Assuming the user-defined videodb PDB uses an Oracle TNS Service Name of videodb, you would test your connection with this script:

<?php
  // Attempt to connect to your database.
  $c = @oci_connect("video", "video", "localhost/videodb");
  if (!$c) {
    print "Sorry! The connection to the database failed. Please try again later.";
    die();
  }
  else {
    print "Congrats! You've connected to an Oracle database!";
    oci_close($c);
  }
?>

Line 3 above uses the TNS Service Name from the tnsnames.ora file, which is also the SID Name from the listener.ora file after the slash that follows the localhost. That’s the only trick you should need.

You should note that because the tnsnames.ora file uses a video service name, the connection from the command line differs:

sqlplus video@video/video

Hope this helps those trying to sort it out.