The issue is this: We want users to be able to log in to our website securely. Right now we've just got the apache server set to authenticate users against our LDAP database, but we'd like to move to a PHP authentication in the page itself. In part of this page, the users can edit some information (like a calendar) that gets stored in an oracle database.

The user accounts in LDAP are mirrored in the oracle database, and different users already have access privileges to different database tables, and we'd like to use the same login that authenticates them against LDAP to open the database connection handle for that users session

I can't find anything that will tell me if there is any secure way to do both operations at the same time

I've found the PHP LDAP libraries, and we've been using the OCI8 functions for a while now, but so far we've only been connecting as an unprivileged generic user.