How do I test for an Oracle connection

Question

I'm trying to connect to an Oracle DB which is currently offline. When it's online it's not a problem, however, now that it's offline my program is getting hung up on the $connection = oci_connect() line and timing out. How do I simply check the connectio and bail out if it's not there?

Answer 1

Try this (fill in your ip and port):

if ( @fsockopen($db_ip,$db_port ) ) {
    //connect to database
} else {
    // didn't work
}

Answer 2

This gives you both a manual error, plus will return the actual error.

$connection = oci_connect() or die("Critical Error: Could not connect to database.\n\n". oci_error());

Make sure to test this as hopefully the Oracle error doesn't do something stupid like return the connection string (with your DB password) but I wouldn't assume until you see for yourself.