Share via


Not much activity on PDO, does this mean "it just works" and we ship it?

Time and time again we have been told that Microsoft needs to provide a good PDO driver as this is the future direction for PHP. Given how many different feature requests were filed and comments posted (not just on this forum, on our Connect site, blog, survey, etc.), the download and forum activity statistics for the version 2.0 CTP are significantly lower than our previous CTPs and Final releases.

“How much lower?” one may ask. Currently it is at about 25% of the peak we had for our previous v1.1 CTP that we released in May 2009.

Couple that with the fact that we have only a handful of support posts on our MSDN forum, again much lower than for our v1.1 CTP, and that Drupal 7 has successfully adopted it for their SQL Server / SQL Azure support, it is indeed quite surprising.

Does this mean that people just didn’t need it and we shouldn’t have done it?
Or does it mean that it is so broken that we need to start from scratch and do it over?
Or does it mean that it meets your needs and, except for the few issues reported, we should consider shipping it very soon?

Well, it is kind of too late for the first, and the forum activity doesn’t quite support the second. Which leaves us with the third scenario, and not quite what we expected.

The Drupal, Doctrine and Zend folks did and sent us some feedback. Our PDO driver is available on our download center as well as a referenceable component in the Web Platform Installer.

So, I urge you all to download it and try it out.

Let us know what you think, all feedback welcome. We look forward to it!

Happy PDO coding!

Ashay Chaudhary
Program Manager, SQL Server Driver for PHP

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2010
    I just discovered this version now! Looking forward to trying it out. Thanks... There were some limitations with the SQL Server 2005 driver that really prevented us for using it on some applications, namely how it handles UTF-8 strings and it does not support the legacy mssql php driver function names. Has this changed? Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2010
    What I'm trying to say is, have the issues with the 2005 driver that were mentioned in the  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqldriverforphp/thread/3202a624-5369-4c52-b874-20f9919d2b7e message been addressed? I'd love to use the Microsoft driver, but until the issues are resolved... I can't...

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2010
    First, it's a really old thread and a lot of progress has been made since the CTP release of version 1.0 of the driver. I would like to clear up some confusion here. Yes, Microsoft has publicly documented the TDS protocol used by SQL Server. Microsoft does not support the mssql driver nor the FreeTDS driver. So how does this matter to the issues reported? UTF-8 support: this is now addressed as version 1.1 released in Oct 2009 adds built in support for UTF-8 encoding. This makes it much easier on the application or it's database layer, please refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628167(v=SQL.90).aspx for additional information. Moodle config option dbtype: this is really a Moodle issue to address. That said, we have been working with Moodle on this. The bad news is that Moodle 1.9.x is locked down to bug fix mode only, the good news is that we have submitted a small patch to Moodle 2.0 code base to support our driver. See http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16497 for reference, Fixed Branches == MOODLE_20_STABLE. @DiamondEagle - It isn't clear whether the app you want to use it for is Moodle or something else (that has the same issues that Moodle does). If you can clarify, that would be awesome. Hope this helps.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2010
    Sorry for replying to "a really old thread"... Yes, I want to use the MS driver with Moodle. I see that Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 (beta) has been released. Do you know if they have incorporated your patch? The Moodle Tracker issue that you referenced has been assigned to michael s ketcham (v-michke at microsoft dot com) but there doesn't seem to be any recent activity on that issue.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2010
    Well, I made a simple test of the driver in the application powered by propel and symfony, and I admit it just works. Thank you.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2010
    @DiamondEagle: we have feedback on our patch from the moodle db gurus, we are working on incorporating it. @JanBlaha: thanks for the feedback, glad it works for you. #auroraeosrose: i know to well the "i'm sure others will test it and find the bugs" phenomenon. :( hopefully this post spurs some activity.

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    I just found out that this was available, though I won't be able to implement it until it is supported as an adapter by Zend_Db.

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    @sqlphp: Thanks for the info. Should I wait for an announcement that the feedback that you received from the moodle db gurus has been incorporated into your driver before I start testing the driver with Moodle?

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    @DiamondEagle: We are working with Eloy/Martin, please wait until the announcement.

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2010
    I am thrilled to see this version of the driver.  Now I have connection-pooling for my PHP/Yii based website.  Thank you very much - please  do not think your efforts have been wasted.  On the contrary I have been looking for this functionality for a long time

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2010
    Great stuff! I've tested it with Moodle and it seems to be working nicely. Well done Microsoft! Thanks for supporting open source...

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2010
    Jeremy - glad it works for you, please test the latest CTP2 and let us know if you run into any issues. The sooner the better as we are about to wrap it up and ship. DiamondEagle - glad it works for you, do test with the CTP2 bits and let us know of any issues. we are waiting for the docs to be updated and are working with Martin on some IE issues Moodle 2.0 seems to have run into (well, we are just trying to hook up Martin with the right IE folks)..