With several articles out there about sharing session across multiple servers on databases, there seemed to be a lack of examples that used SQL Server to do it. Enrico Zimuel has helped to solve that problem with his new post on using Zend Server and SQL Server to persist the session data.

In the open source community there are many examples on how to share session data using database but i didn’t found an example using MS SQL Server with the new Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP so I decided to write a new session handler from scratch. I used the last version 1.1 of the Microsoft SQL Server Driver. I tested the session handler using two Windows Server 2003 running IIS6 and Zend Server 5 CE. I used a SQL Server 2005 database to share the PHP session between the two servers.

He shows you how to set up the custom session handler, create the table where the session data will be stored and includes a sample test script (a part of his SQLSrv_Session class) so you can ensure that it's all cooperating as it should.