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The Laravel News site has a tutorial posted showing the Microsoft SQL Server users out there how to install the drivers and use it in a Laravel application in a Docker environment.
I started a project recently that required that I connect a Microsoft SQL Server database with a the final result when everything is up and running.
The Zend Framework blog has a new post from Enrico Zimuel talking about the use of SQL Server for Linux from inside a PHP-based application. This makes use of the preview release of SQL Server for Linux directly from Microsoft.
This week we tested the public preview of Microsoft SQL Server for Linux using PHP 7 with our component zendframework/zend-db.Microsoft announced the availability of a public preview of SQL Server for Linux on the 16th of November, 2016. [...] Moreover, the performance of the new DBMS seems to be very impressive. Microsoft published a case study with 1.2 million requests per second with In-Memory OLTP on a single commodity server.
The tutorial shows you how to get the SQL Server software installed on a Ubuntu-based system and install it via apt-get. They also show how to install the command line tool for SQL Server and get the msodbcsql driver needed to make the connection. Finally they show how to set up the driver with PHP 7 (via PDO) and running the Zend/Db integration tests using a Vagrant-created and configured VM instance.
In the latest tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog author Wern Ancheta shows you how to integrate your application with the Microsoft Text Analytics API, a service offered by the company putting machine learning to work on things like keyword extraction, topic detection and language detection.
With the explosion of machine learning services in recent years, it has become easier than ever for developers to create “smart apps”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to Microsoft’s offering for providing machine-learning capabilities to apps. Specifically, you’ll learn about the Text Analytics API and build an app to enhance the understanding of online sellers when it comes to their customers.
The tutorial then introduces the Microsoft Cognitive Services API and, more specifically, the Text Analytics API that they'll be hooking the application in to. They walk you through getting an API key for the service, creating an "account" for the application you're working with and deploying it for immediate use. They introduce the functionality of the API with a few "play" examples of each API offered before getting into the creation of their sample application - a tool that reviews the contents of customer feedback, looking for key phrases and returns highlighted versions with what it sees as important.
In this recent post to his site Remi Collet shows you how to set up your PHP installation to allow it to work with a Microsoft SQL Server as it's data store.
Here is a small comparison of the various solutions to use a [Microsoft SQL Server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server) database from PHP, on Linux. All the tests have be run on Fedora 23 but should work on RHEL or CentOS version 7.
Several different extensions were tested as a part of making the connection to the SQL server:
Each item comes with a list of the requirements involved (other modules/extensions), examples of the configuration changes you'll need to make and some sample code to create the connection.
It's not specific to the world of PHP but there was a major announcement from Microsoft yesterday about one of their products, SQL Server, and how they're officially brining it to Linux.
Today I’m excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.[...] Bringing SQL Server to Linux is another way we are making our products and new innovations more accessible to a broader set of users and meeting them where they are.
Currently the release is in a private preview stage but more information on the release and how you can get it to install on your systems will be released in the coming months. You can sign up for updates and get more information about the product on the project website on Microsoft.com.
On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial posted from editor Bruno Skvorc where he attempts to replicate the "What-Dog" application recently created by Microsoft in under 100 lines of code. It makes use of the Diffbot service to do the actual detection and evaluation.
Rather recently, Microsoft released an app using AI to detect a dog’s breed. [...] In my non-SitePoint time, I also work for Diffbot – the startup you may have heard of over the past few weeks – who also dabble in AI. To test how they compare, in this tutorial we’ll recreate Microsoft’s application using Diffbot’s technology to see if it does a better job at recognizing the adorable beasts we throw at it!
He walks you through the installation and configuration of the software you'll need (and account you'll need to create). From there he shares the code to take in the user's upload, send it as a POST request over to the Diffbot service and returning the relevant results. He finishes out the article with a comparison of the two services, posting various images and seeing which comes closer.
On the Zend Developer Zone blog Daniel Berman has posted a guide showing how to use their Z-Ray plugin to inspect code running on Azure for statistics around performance, queries and errors thrown by the code.
Quick experimentation, easy collaboration, automated infrastructure and scalability, together with advanced diagnostic and analytical tools – all provide PHP developers with good reasons to develop in the cloud.[...] The combination of Z-Ray and the Azure cloud means PHP developers building apps on the Azure web app service get the best of both worlds – Z-Ray’s powerful introspection capabilities and Azure’s rich cloud infrastructure.
The post walks you through the steps to create a new Azure-based web application, how to upload your code and enable the Z-Ray feature directly from the Azure "Tools" menu. The Z-Ray toolbar is then automatically injected into your application for your immediate profiling needs.
On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial showing you how to integrate the Z-Ray tool into WordPress to make debugging it on an Azure instance simpler. The steps make major use of the Azure control panel handling, so it's not quite as useful as a cross-platform guide but at least it gives you an idea of what you could expect from the Z-Ray+WordPress integration.
We all know that WordPress is an amazingly rich, extendable and simple platform. That’s probably one of the reasons it powers so much of the web today. But in some cases this richness can be the downfall of your site. [...] This means you need an easy, safe and reliable way to profile your WordPress app that will help you identify the bottlenecks slowing it down.This article demonstrates a simple way to do just this. It describes how to debug a WordPress application deployed on Microsoft Azure’s web app service, using Z-Ray for Azure – a new technology that was announced a few months ago and is now in preview mode.
He walks you through the entire process (assuming you already have an account on Azure:
In that last step he includes some screenshots of the kinds of results you can expect from the plugin including details about cache objects, plugin statistics, hooks being executed and WP Query use. He ends the post looking at using Z-Ray for mobile debugging and how to use it in "secured mode" in a production environment.
In this recent video on the Microsoft Channel9 video series, host Cory Fowler shares a presentation from Pierre Joye with a "peek of the PHP ecosystem today".
This week Cory is joined by Pierre Joye, from the Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft, to talk about the current state of the PHP Ecosystem. There are many different projects in PHP which are making news, Pierre explains what they are and how they are changing the shape of the PHP Ecosystem.
You can watch the episode through the in-page video player or you have numerous options for downloading just the audio as high/low quality as mp3 or mp4.
SitePoint's PHP blog has a new post that walks you through the creation of Excel files with the help of the PHPExcel tool, a part of the overall PHPOffice package.
After my article “How To Make Microsoft Word Documents with PHP” (using Interop capability under Windows), there were quite a few comments urging a pure PHP implementation, i.e., only using a universal PHP library to manipulate Office files. In this article, we will see how to use a PHPExcel library to provide an “Export to Excel” function in a web app so that the user can export the data into an Excel 2007/2013 file for further analysis.
His example spreadsheet shows game information for an NBA team (the LA Lakers) including some charting and analytic data in the exported output. He sets up a simple Silex application and both a base and export endpoints. He also shows you how to create the PHPExcel instance, configure it with properties like creator, title and a set of keywords. With this object in place he moves into setting data for each of the rows/cells, populating it from a database table. He also includes examples of creating more than one sheet of results, inserting formulas and creating the charts mentioned earlier.
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