What is the working version of PHP7.4+Oracle8?

Question

linux

At work, the tracker, and the whole CRM was written a million years before our era in PHP 5.3 and oracle 8.

For the third day I've been fighting - I can't make friends with any oci library that works with Oracle 8 along with php 7.4.

All modern versions of the oracle client stupidly do not want to connect to the database.

I understand that the best decision is to switch to the new Oracle, but the fact is that all the company's services work on Oracle 8, especially billing, which cannot be transferred to the new version just like that, and I even have such ideas in my thoughts as put debian 7-8, go back to the prehistoric age, and write services on the adodb.inc.php library for oracle 8. But this is finally hard.

Answer 1

https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-oci
https://www.php.net/manual/ru/oci8.requirements.php
there is a funny leapfrog with library and client versions in the requirements, but theoretically possible.
I can suggest trying to spread (if not now) the server and client for php to different machines (of course, a virtual machine / docker), since the oracle installer can handle such situations poorly.
ps if you can't overcome it, cut the layer, the benefit of work for the evening, i.e. literally http (or even websocket) server in php itself (be careful with multithreading) of the old version works exclusively for making requests and serializing the response. Of course, there will be overhead costs (not necessarily large), but then the question is what is more important to you - development costs or hardware costs, and most importantly, you will have the opportunity to correct this layer for optimization.
I'm not sure, but there is a chance that this layer already exists (http => sql), look for it.

Answer 2

As an option, install a minimal installation of Oracle 10-11 and make a DB-link to Oracle 8. Oracle does not officially guarantee work with older versions, but it works quite successfully in our production.