SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog

It is my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has released an update to version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP.  The update to the driver is the April 2009 Cumulative Update and it contains a series of targeted fixes, the majority of which were reported by the community via the MSDN Forum.  For more details on the specific fixes, please see the readme included in the download package.

One of the most common tasks of any web application involves allowing a user to ‘page’ through a large amount of data. In other words, given a large result set, the task is to present the user with a manageable subset and allow him/her to navigate through the result set by viewing ‘pages’ (i.e. subsets) of data. In this post, I’ll demonstrate two ways to do this with the existing functionality of the SQL Server Driver for PHP. Also note that the strategies discussed here can be applied to paging data regardless of the programming language or database.

The SQL Server Driver for PHP team is hard at work on the version 1.1 of the extension.  We've received a lot of feedback for feature requests from PHP developers through the blog, forums, the Seattle PHP meetup group, and various conferences.  The most frequent feature requests have been in the following areas: 

In this post I want to demonstrate how the streaming capabilities of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP work seamlessly with the new FILESTREAM functionality in SQL Server 2008.

One question we have heard a lot since releasing the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is “Does the driver work with SQL Server 2008?” The short answer is “Yes!” However, because the driver relies on the SQL Server 2005 ODBC driver to handle low-level communications with the server, we have heard some follow up questions about how our driver works with the new data types that are available in SQL Server 2008. In this post, I will demonstrate how the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP interacts with these new data types. If you are not familiar with the new SQL Server 2008 data types, you can read an overview here: SQL Server 2008: New Data Types.

It is my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has released an update to version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.  The update to the driver is the October 2008 Cumulative Update and it contains fixes to two high priority bugs reported via the MSDN Forum:

I recently attended ZendCon 08 in Santa Clara, CA with David Sceppa, Program Manager for the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. We hosted a "Birds of a Feather" (BOF) session and were happy to get feedback and field lots of good questions from developers who are using our driver. During the session, our discussion touched on how and why to use parameterized queries. The focus of this post is to recap that conversation and to demonstrate how to use parameterized queries with the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

Brian Swan and I are here at ZendCon08 to talk with PHP developers about the SQL Server Driver for PHP.  Come visit us in the Microsoft booth and say, "Hi!"