Brian Swan has a new post to his blog about how you can change the database settings in your SQL Server database (with a connection using the PDO_SQLSRV driver) through a SQL query.

The short story is this: If you are using the PDO_SQLSRV driver and you want to execute a query that changes a database setting (e.g. SET NOCOUNT ON), use the PDO::query method with the PDO::SQLSRV_ATTR_DIRECT_QUERY attribute. If you use PDO::query without that attribute, the database setting you expected to change may not be applied to subsequent queries. The longer story has to do with why this is the case, which is what I'll explain in this post.

The problem is that, when changes to settings are made, they don't seem to stick. Future queries act like they were never even updated. The solution to the problem is to use that PDO::SQLSRV_ATTR_DIRECT_QUERY attribute on the connection (set to true). You can see the difference in execution from this to this.