Ariz Jacinto has written up a new post with the commands you'll need to get PHP up and runnign with MSSQL Server's native ODBC driver working on linux (accessible through PDO).

Last month, MS announced the preview release of SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, a 64-bit binary driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This is good news for companies using heterogenous platforms e.g. LAMP stack running a PHP application that connects to both MySQL and MSSQL Server. Meaning, these companies no longer have to use third-party drivers such as FreeTDS that MS doesn't support. Then a few days ago, MS released version 1 of the driver. I immediately downloaded the driver and recompiled PHP with it as a PDO (PHP Data Object) ODBC driver.

His process has five steps to it, including one for making a test script (code included) and another with a few gotchas/performance considerations to keep an eye out for when using the driver.

As Brian Swan has mentioned in his latest blog post, the ODBC database driver for SQL Server on Linux has been released. This is a huge step forward for directly connecting linux-based systems (and programming languages) to this popular Microsoft product.

The first beta release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux is available for download! As announced in October, the "Multiplatform Team" (a.k.a. the "MPlat Team") has released a preview version of a driver that will provide first-class access to SQL Server from applications running on Linux operating systems. The team is looking for feedback on this release to incorporate into their production-ready release, so try it out and let us know what you think.

He links to a few resources about the release - more details, a link to download the driver and the official documentation.

On IBM's developerWorks site there's a new tutorial that wants to help you get started with ODBC in PHP, using the iodbc libraries and extension for PHP to connect to a database and pull back results.

Let's look at how a typical Linux-Apache-PHP-MySQL (LAMP) environment can be transformed into this flexible Linux-Apache-PHP-ODBC (LAPO) environment. There are two general options for ODBC drivers on Linux: iODBC and unixODBC. Both sets of drivers have their own pros and cons, and both work with PHP, but they work with different sets of databases. My choice is iODBC because of its traditionally strong connection to web programming languages like PHP and Ruby, as well as its stability in working with ODBC-friendly databases like MySQL and OpenLink Virtuoso.

There's a few steps in there to help you get the needed tools installed (linux server) to make the connection. Snippets of code are included showing how to connect to the server, run some simple SQL statements, fetch returned row information and do some basic debugging of the connection.

In his continuing series looking at using the SQL Server driver in PHP applications, Brian Swan has posted a new tutorial looking at enabling ODBC tracing in your SQL Server-driven PHP application.

The short story [of the backup issue] is that a query I was executing from PHP seemed to execute successfully (no errors were returned), but the results of the query were not what I expected. When I executed the same query from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), the query executed successfully and I got the results I expected. What was going on?

To try to figure out what was going on he needed to get down to the SNAC/ODBC level and trace the process as it went through. By enabling the "TraceOn" and "TraceFile" parameters in the connection's options, you can get a wealth of information returned along with the normal data. He includes some of the trace information to give you an idea of what he was looking at to solve his problem. In the end, the tracing helped him see more what was working than not and discovered a possible bug in the ODBC drivers that could be causing it to hang in a "restoring" state on the "RESTORE DATABASE" call.

Juozas Kaziukenas (thanks to his work in the WinPHP Challenge) has posted his look at using the SQL native driver to allow the Zend Framework to interact with a MSSQL database backend.

Now some of these issues [that Stuart Herbert pointed out] are fixed, however Microsoft native Sql driver is still not used. [...] However, none of these is available in Zend Framwork. So my task now (because of Winphp competition) is to come up with something what can be used to connect to Microsft Sql database with the new driver.

He looks at how to set up two different options for a database configuration: with a PDO_ODBC adapter and an adapterNamespace setting to define the adapter type to use and the other with an MSSQL adapter type.

Developer.com has posted a new article today looking at some of the features that tie PHP and the DB2 Universal Database together and make application development possible.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseTM (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OSTM, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems.

In this article, I explore the features that make programming PHP-based DB2 UDB applications as seamless as possible and ultimately shorten the development cycle for these types of applications.

They start off introducing PHP and how it's used, but quickly move into describing the APIs that allows PHP to talk to DB2 UDB. They list out a few - the IBM extension for PHP, the PDO ODBC connection utility, and a fading option, the unified ODBC driver. They also spend some time looking at the Zend Core for IBM, including a small tour of the integration of it with the ZDE that's offered.

Developer.com has posted a new article today looking at some of the features that tie PHP and the DB2 Universal Database together and make application development possible.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseTM (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OSTM, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems.

In this article, I explore the features that make programming PHP-based DB2 UDB applications as seamless as possible and ultimately shorten the development cycle for these types of applications.

They start off introducing PHP and how it's used, but quickly move into describing the APIs that allows PHP to talk to DB2 UDB. They list out a few - the IBM extension for PHP, the PDO ODBC connection utility, and a fading option, the unified ODBC driver. They also spend some time looking at the Zend Core for IBM, including a small tour of the integration of it with the ZDE that's offered.