The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial CentOS users out there might want to check out. It steps through the installation of a MSSQL database extension for PHP (it's not installed by default) from the yum repository.

As you might have noticed on Centos 5.0, there is no PHP-MSSQL module/extension available in the default yum repositories. So if you want to use it you can alter the PHP binary or you can compile an mssql module/extension. In this article I will explain how to compile the mssql module/extension.

It's a pretty simple process involving only a few downloads (RPM files) and altering the contents of some configuration files to make things work together happily. In the end, you'll have a dynamic extension you can load into your PHP installation whenever you want.

On PHPBuilder.com today, there's a new tutorial focusing on the development of PHP applications that can be run on different database environments without many changes to the actual application.

There are several options available to interact with multiple database engines with PHP, such as Pear DB and MDB2. However, there may instances where you will be required to develop your own custom database interface that connects to many different database engines using a single unified syntax. This article will address the development of a class that will do exactly that. In addition, we will include the ability to replicate data among several databases in real time.

They create their own abstraction layer that has the ability to make the connection, replicate data between connections, handle some errors and work with database configuration data. The tutorial shows you how to use the script for three different database types - MySQL, Oracle, and MS SQL.