Alex @ Net

Stu's recent post Microsoft’s First PHP Extension: SQL Server 2005 Support contains a few thoughts on why PHP requires improved driver for SQL Server 2005. I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment.

These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community: at October 9, 2007 they published CTP release of SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

A few quick notes on the driver:

• Works only on Windows, requires MS SQL Server Native Client.
• It is nor PDO driver, nor OOP driver.
• No source code (of course), no header files, only a few DLL, DOC and TXT files. Not protocol specification.
• Good API specification, enough code examples.
• Supports parametrized SQLs.
• Supports data streams.
• in phpinfo it is indicated as follows: sqlsrv, sqlsrv support enabled.