Authenticating throught Middle tier using Oracle 8i

Hi, Sometime ago I was looking for an aplication server that could handle user connections so that security considerations was handled at database level not application level. PHP is very fast and flexible but this enterprise feature is more important than anything else for my company, so we choose the Oracle Application Server. Let me try to explain better. Many people write applications giving too many privileges to the web user and all pages connect to the database using this user, but when we need to code another set of applications more security considerations need to be handled. Otherwise if we choose using database user authentication any request to a web page means one login/logout to the database raising the response time between the web server and client, that is not acceptable too. (I tried this). Using Oracle 8i we can create a server connection for each httpd process using an user with limited set of privileges, and when we need a private connection we just create a layer re-authenticating the user with more privileges. With this aproach we can have the performance of a persistent connection with the security of a limited set of privileges. This is the most important feature missing in PHP4 for me, but my knowledge in C is poor to code and patch the oci8 module for PHP, but I'd like to know if is ther anyone else interested in this feature to ask for top PHP developers to code it when they have time ? Please take a look on oracle documentation at: http://technet.oracle.com/doc/oracle8i_816/appdev.816/a76939/adg12sec.htm#18345 Thanks for your comments! and sorry my poor english too... Alessandro Oliveira Nuno Ferreira Cargas Internacionais Ltda. Sao Paulo - SP Brazil