There are 2 supported drivers that allow connections to Microsoft SQL Server databases from SQL Server 2005 upwards.
This driver, which runs on both Windows and Linux clients, allows connections to Microsoft SQL Server databases versions 2008 and up, and uses the Microsoft Native Client libraries. This driver is recommended for Windows Clients running PHP 5.3 and higher, and Linux Clients running PHP 7.0 and higher, and provides the fastest PHP connection.
More about the Microsoft SQL Server client for Linux here
This allows connections from Unix based clients using the freetds libraries. It can be used with version 5.x of PHP
More about the FreeTDS libraries here
Driver Name | mssqlnative |
---|---|
Data Provider | mssqlnative |
Status | Active1) |
Windows | Yes |
Unix | Yes |
ADOdb V5 | Yes |
ADOdb V6 | Yes |
PDO driver for SQL Server
ODBC driver for SQL Server
This is the preferred driver for connecting to a SQL server database from both Windows and Linux clients.
The original driver was contributed by Microsoft and provides connections to SQL server databases greater than SQL Server 2003.
Sequences are supported in native mode in SQL Sever 2012, and emulated in earlier versions.
The default behavior for the PHP mssqlnative driver is to return date/time fields as a PHP dateTime object, that looks like this:
[RequiredDate] => DateTime Object ( [date] => 1996-08-01 00:00:00.000000 [timezone_type] => 3 [timezone] => America/Denver )
However, in order to improve portability, the default behaviour of the ADOdb mssqlnative driver is to return the date as a string:
[RequiredDate] => 1996-08-01 00:00:00.000000
In order to return the dateTime as an object, the following action is required:
$db = ADONewConnection('mssqlnative'); $db->setConnectionParameter('ReturnDatesAsStrings',false); $db->connect('SERVER\SQLEXPRESS','user','password','NORTHWND');
You can set the character set to UTF-8 using:
$db = ADONewConnection('mssqlnative'); $db->setConnectionParameter('characterSet','UTF-8'); $db->connect('SERVER\SQLEXPRESS','user','password','NORTHWND');
To use Windows, instead of SQL Server authentication, pass NULL as the user and password as shown below
$db = ADONewConnection('mssqlnative'); $db->connect('SERVER\SQLEXPRESS',NULL,NULL,'NORTHWND');
Recent versions of SQL Server fail to connect with an error Message: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server]SSL Provider: The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.
This problem can be resolved by adding
$db->setConnectionParameter('TrustServerCertificate',1);
before issuing the $db→connect()
statement
Establishing a connection to a SQL server database from a Linux client can be difficult, but by installing the freetds tools as well as the Microsoft ones provides a highly useful tool, tsql
In the example, our database is running on a server 192.168.0.65:
# tsql -LH 192.168.0.65 ServerName STUDY InstanceName SQLEXPRESS IsClustered No Version 12.0.2000.8 tcp 55644 np \\STUDY\pipe\MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS\sql\query
The response from the command tells us the
We can now create a connection string:
$db = ADONewConnection('mssqlnative'); $db->connect('192.168.0.65,55644',$user,$pass,'NORTHWND');
Driver Name | mssql |
---|---|
Data Provider | mssql |
Status | Active2) |
Windows | No |
Unix | Yes |
ADOdb V5 | Yes |
ADOdb V6 | Yes |
This is the preferred driver for connecting to a SQL server database from Linux/Unix clients, when the PHP version is less than 7.0 This driver provides access to Microsoft SQL Server databases from unix systems via Freetds
This driver was the primary connection method to SQL Server databases up to PHP Version 5.2. The windows dll associated with this driver (php_mssql.dll) was removed from the standard PHP distribution in PHP Version 5.3. There is no community support for this driver.
Driver Name | mssqlpo |
---|---|
Data Provider | mssql |
Status | Inactive5) |
Windows | No |
Unix | Yes |
ADOdb V5 | Yes |
ADOdb V6 | Yes |
This driver provides undocumented portability extensions to the Unix mssql driver
Driver Name | mssqlpo |
---|---|
Data Provider | mssql |
Status | Inactive6) |
Windows | No |
Unix | Yes |
ADOdb V5 | Yes |
ADOdb V6 | Yes |
This driver appears to provide Unicode enhancements to the mssql driver. You can set character sets using the setConnectionParameter() command