I spent part of yesterday and a good part of today getting PHP to work correctly on my XP box and then on a county server running 2003. I discovered that the way to make it not work is to use the install packages provided by the PHP people. You have to hand craft the install.

Hand crafting leaves lots of room for typos and forgotten steps. I have it down pat now, but I will most likely forget most of it in a month or so. I’m writing down the gotchas for future reference.

The hinky part of the install was to configure it to connect to all the databases around here. We have mostly Oracle, but there are DB2 and MS SQL Server dbs. There are also Paradox and other odd databases around, not to mention MS Access.

Oracle fought back, but I drilled through it and I now have both Oracle 10g and Oracle 11g connections to all the test and applications servers here. There is a server running Oracle 8g that I had trouble with, but I even found a way around that.

I wrote a test page to read some data from each of the databases as I tested them. It extracted the EMP table off of the SCOTT user space.

Every Oracle database that I’ve worked on, and I started with Oracle 3, has had a user name SCOTT with a password of TIGER. It contains some simple tables for testing and learning SQL commands. I learned Oracle from the SCOTT/TIGER database.

It never occurred to me until today to ask who Scott was.

I googled Scott tiger oracle and this is what I found:

Bruce Scott was one of the first employees at Oracle (then Software Development Laboratories). He co-founded Gupta Technology (now known as Centura Software) in 1984 with Umang Gupta, and later became CEO and founder of PointBase, Inc. Bruce was co-author and co-architect of Oracle V1, V2 and V3. The SCOTT schema (EMP and DEPT tables), with password TIGER, was created by him. Tiger was the name of his cat.