Storing PHP 5.3 sessions into PostgreSQL 8.4

Hello,

I'm using CentOS 6.0 Linux 64 bit with the stock packages:

# rpm -qa|grep php
php-cli-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64
php-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64
php-xml-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64
php-pgsql-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64
php-pear-1.9.0-2.el6.noarch
php-pdo-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64
php-common-5.3.2-6.el6_0.1.x86_64

# rpm -qa|grep postgres
postgresql-devel-8.4.7-1.el6_0.1.x86_64
postgresql-docs-8.4.7-1.el6_0.1.x86_64
postgresql-libs-8.4.7-1.el6_0.1.x86_64
postgresql-8.4.7-1.el6_0.1.x86_64
postgresql-server-8.4.7-1.el6_0.1.x86_64

and would like to change my own PHP script from using
$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] to using $_SESSION,
but don't have any experience with PHP sessions yet.

I'd like the (quite extensive) user data to be stored into
the PostgreSQL and only save a "user id" in $_SESSION.

However the web page
http://www.php.net/manual/en/session-pgsql.installation.php
says "This extension is considered unmaintained and dead".

Does anybody please have any advice what to do here?

Maybe I can save session data into the db myself (and how)?

Thank you
Alex