Working on version 1.1 of the SQL Server Driver for PHP

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:

1. Support for PHP 5.3
2. Support for handling UTF-8 strings in parameters and resultset values, without requiring calls to iconv or other extensions
3. Support for scrollable results and row count

We are working on addressing these feature requests for the next version of the extension.

We are doing some preliminary work to test our existing version 1.0 extension with PHP 5.3 and providing guidance to help developers working with current builds of PHP 5.3 use the version 1.0 extension. Keep an eye on this blog for more information regarding using the version 1.0 driver with PHP 5.3. We expect to fully support PHP 5.3 with version 1.1 of our extension.

For UTF-8 strings, we are working on adding support for this and other character sets to the extension. Having the SQL Server Driver for PHP handle UTF-8 strings means that the extension will handle the translations between UTF-8 and UCS-2 (little endian) since the SQL Server database engine does not currently support the UTF-8 character set. We're working on handling parameters and resultset values using UTF-8, as well as handling the query strings in UTF-8 format.

We are also working on adding scrollable resultset support to the extension. The initial version of the SQL Server Driver for PHP retrieves query results in an unbuffered forward-only mode, an approach that yields the best possible performance for retrieving query results from SQL Server but one where there is no way to know how many rows the resultset contains ahead of time. We are planning on adding support for scrollable resultsets to the extension in version 1.1, giving PHP developers the ability to access any row as well as the ability to determine how many rows are available within the resultset.

David Sceppa

Program Manager - Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  Any chance we'll see an unix version anytime soon? The biggest barrier to SQL Server adoption in PHP projects is, IMHO, the lack of a production quality driver for unix. I mean, your driver IS cool. But the builtin Windows version of PHP driver for SQL Server works reasonably well. And if I were to run on Windows probably would go to ASP.NET.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  Wow! Wonderful! Thanks for listening! The UTF-8 support is very well thought. In PHP, the Unicode support is so poor I end up processing all strings as binary (UTF-8) and storing them in IMAGE fields in SQL Server so the server won't mess with what is inside. I really look forward this new version. When can we expect it?

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Any news on the progress? Specially UTF-8 support? Any  release dates known? Thank you.

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2009
  Thanks for the feedback so far. I can't comment on the release timeframe at the moment.  We're still discussing and prioritizing features at the moment, which affects the schedule. I also appreciate the feedback regarding Unix support.  Connectivity from non-Windows machines is on our radar.

• David

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 29, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2009
  Hello David. Is there a road map of the Sql Server Driver? I wonder if an Unix edition of the driver is available in months or years. Regards, Jochem

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  Hello, Any news available on 1.1? It would be nice to know aprox., so that we can coordinate some work.

• Peter

• Anonymous
  July 16, 2009
  We would greatly appreciate any response on version 1.1 as we need to decide which way to go.

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2009
  It's a good news if the driver supports on linux platform.