Building High-Performance Drivers for Oracle Database 11g: OCI Tips and Tricks (PDF). I had the opportunity to have an early look at this white paper by Luxi Chidamdaram.

The paper goes over what needs to be done to use OCI effectively, especially in a web environment. The step-by-step approach taken in this document is very readable and the well explained code snippets make it a very good reference — great for comparing your code to the “proper” way to do it.

The novice OCI programmer will find the initial sections of great benefit, as it takes a lot of mystery out of OCI programming. For the more advanced OCI-head, the document is full of good examples of how to manage connections, sessions, and pooling–with an examination of what type of pooling is needed in a given situation.

One highlight for me was the section on database events, which are covered very effectively with some practical examples.

In short, this white paper is a must-read for both the OCI master and the novice, with some great pointers on how to use what is already in OCI and what is new in 11.