In this latest post to his blog Rob Allen takes a look at a problem he had when installing a project that used SQL Server as its data source - it just didn't work.

A good proportion of the projects my company undertakes end up on Windows servers with IIS and SQL Server and hence we use the SqlSrv PHP extension from Microsoft. We don't host any of these projects ourselves and leave it up to the client's IT department. This is the main reason that we use a database abstraction layer, Zend_Db, in our case as we can swap the underlying database out with less hassle. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a problem when installing our app onto the client's server. It didn't work. This was a surprise as we have a few Windows Server VMWare installations on which we had tested and they had worked fine.

He ultimately boiled it down to an exception from the SQL Server - "String data, right truncation". As it turns out, with the version 2 of the sqlsrv driver, you can't have a field name longer than 30 characters. There's two obvious workarounds - shorten the field name or use a PDO interface. Since one doesn't exist (well, not formally) he created his own you can drop into your application if you have the need.