SQL Server driver for PHP5
February 9, 2008
For anyone that has struggled with using PHP and MSSQL over the years, this one may come as some pleasant news (if you’re still in that situation). Microsoft has put out a preview of “SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP” back in October 2007 (yeah, I just found out this morning!). Ehh… not as impressed as I thought I would be, in that it’s still only for PHP apps deployed on Windows. This isn’t replacing freetds any time soon. I guess I’m still wondering what the market for “PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server” really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I’ve seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.
Scratch that - I’ve started to see SQL server as an option more recently (bit of a brain pause there a moment ago!). This is perhaps a bit of a chicken/egg situation - if there’s a more stable driver, this may help hosting companies push SQL Server as their default DB option (perhaps eventually charging for a MySQL installation as an option?).
There’s a video of the team talking about the project here (but you’ll need silverlight to watch it!) and the team’s blog here.
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Posted in Database, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Software, Web
February 9th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Hrm - only one post in their blog. Not sure if they’ve not publicized this effort enough (I’d never heard of it before) or there’s just not as much interest as expected?
February 9th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Shared hosting is only a segment of development. I do a lot of custom development and content management work and the main stumbling block to using PHP CMSs at windows shops is MySQL not PHP. Now that PHP can be reliably hosted on IIS most people are fine with PHP being installed alongside .NET apps but they don’t want to run multiple databases.
If they are fine with MySQL they still tend to have .NET SQL Server apps that we want to integrate somehow. I welcome any improvements to using PHP with SQL Server.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Good point. I have this impression in my mind that shops that are already .NET-based would not want to be doing new development in PHP, but that may be a wrong impression. Certainly drives home that there are a lot of development variations that I don’t face on a regular basis.
February 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am
For custom app development I agree that most .NET shops will want to keep new development in .NET. But for website developement, open source CMSs like Typo3 or Drupal will open their minds pretty quickly. The open source .NET CMSs aren’t close to the PHP ones and commercial .NET CMSs that are as good can easily cost $20K or more in licensing.
I find the typical frontend facing site is 90%+ publishing and that leaves just a few page that need content from their .NET/SQL Server stack. That’s where this driver will help me. But if it helps any of the OS PHP CMSs offer transparent hosting on SQL Server rather than MySQL, even better.
February 9th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Wouldn’t surprise me if the driver remains windows only, I saw this slide some days ago from a microsoft employee which indicates that they will try to achieve that if people use opensource solutions, they will use Windows as their platform. And if they are on that platform, Microsoft will ofcourse try to make them replace MySQL with SQL Server, Apache with IIS, Flash with Silverlight and in the end they’d like to replace PHP with some .Net scripting language I’m betting, altough the profit is ofcourse mostly in the server solutions I’m guessing, so the MS php support is not weird at all, but still rather frightening to me…
February 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
We see about a 50/50 split between Linux and Windows for our work. All the Windows shops choose SQL Server instead of MySQL. Linux admin skills are in short supply in the UK (as are Windows ones, but it’s a lot easier to bluff your way on Windows :).
February 10th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
At my last job I migrated the websites of a major Australasian recruitment company over to Apache/PHP/SQL Server on Windows and it’s been running that way since 2002. Not everything is shared hosting. I used ADODB as it had several choices for talking to SQL Server, but any improvements would be great.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
We have lots of people using SugarCRM on SQL Server. The fragmented driver support for SQL Server has been a real challenge for us at times. We had to code around the problems in the Sugar product and getting Sugar to install with SQL Server takes extra manual steps. We would very much like to see the PHP/SQL Server problems addressed by the php.net community, Zend and/or Microsoft some time soon.