Recently at work, I was tasked with finding a method to retrieve data from a third-party SQL Server 2000-based system into our own MySQL-based application. It's worth noting that both system are behind their own firewalls and I was trying to bear security in mind as I did this.

Some highlights of his work included using GoToAssist to get to the system, using EMS SQL Manager to work with the SQL server itself and some of the PHP code he "threw at it" to grab the info he needed from the database (with the PDO drivers).

This isn't replacing freetds any time soon. I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.

He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).

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

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

He's broken it up into two sections: "Why Is It Important For Microsoft To Support PHP On Windows?" and "What's Wrong With The Existing MSSQL Extension For PHP?" He answers the first question by mentioning the new options that it opens up for those that want to run both Windows and PHP and still use their SQL Server databases.

Question two gives four things that he's already seen wrong with the extension including it's limited varchar support, no PDO drivers and the poor level of error reporting.

The SQL Server 2005 driver for PHP "is a PHP 5 extension that allows the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. It provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all Editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 (including Express Edition), and makes use of PHP features, including PHP streams to read and write large objects."

My DSN just was not right and wouldn't play - my host string was off and any permutation I used wasn't working. Looked at the PDO docs, the DSN docs in the manual, connectionstrings.com and no love.

Her final fix involved setting up an "instance" of her SQL server to point to the host. Her code is included.