Hot on oracle.com is a snapshot of Netretail Holding B.V. profiling their use of PHP and Oracle technology such as Oracle RAC cluster database to become a leading online retailer across Central and Eastern Europe.

We've also just refreshed our key PHP Scalability and High Availability whitepaper which talks about connection pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN). We brought it up to date for 11gR2 and PHP 5.3. It now includes the new 11gR2 V$CPOOL_CONN_INFO view, the new columns for DBA_CPOOL_INFO, information about LOGOFF triggers, and information about the support for Client Result Caching with DRCP.

Back to Netretail. Two of their secrets to success are keeping technically up to date, and networking. That is, networking in the business sense. I had the pleasure of meeting Michal Táborský (@whizz), the Chief System Architect, when he was in California for a Velocity conference. Michal took time to visit Oracle HQ and talk with our developers about his then current architecture and future needs. I also met his manager at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference.

Having built up a relationship with us, Netretail now has access to Oracle Development staff. While this will never bypass Oracle Support (which have tools, systems etc that are needed and useful for resolving issues), it makes communication easier for some classes of questions. It helps discussions that will let us improve Oracle products, and make Netretail stronger.

I like this. And there's no reason why you can't talk with us too. You know where to email me.