Brian Swan has posted the second part of his series looking at the difference between the MSSQL driver and the SQLSRV drivers for connecting to SQL Server databases from PHP (part one can be found here). He gets a bit more detailed in this second post.

I'm aiming to provide a high-level comparison that you might use if you were considering moving to the SQLSRV extension, but I think there is also some interesting information if you are just curious about the differences. [...] In cases where a short note wasn't enough (and there were several of these), I've provided relevant links to topics in the SQLSRV documentation.

He talks about things that one offers that the other doesn't, like prepared statements (sqlsrv) and working with stored procedures (mssql). He also mentions error handlng, persistent connections and scrollable cursors in sqlsrv. Finally he gets into a one-to-one function comparison of the two drivers with the sqlsrv function list coming up a bit short compared to the features of the more recend (and well-supported) mssql driver.

In a new post to his blog Brian Swan compares the database drivers for MSSQL and SQLSRV by what they have to offer and what the real differences are to your applications.

In this post I want to begin looking at some of the differences between the two drivers and perhaps gain an understanding of why the mssql driver continues to be used (although I have some good guesses). There are lots of comparison points between the mssql and sqlsrv drivers. I'll break my comparison into two posts, focusing on high-level differences in this post and then dive into an API comparison in the next post.

This first of the two parts looks at some of the differences between the two - the Microsoft support for the sqlsrv driver vs community-driven mssql and the fact that they're very different "under the hood" (see this diagram).

Following in the steps of some of his previous posts looking at the combination of PHP and SQL Server, Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today - a SQL Server driver cheat sheet.

You might think that I would know the driver API by heart at this point, but alas, my many trips back to the documentation are proof that my brain is like a fixed length queue - if something new goes in, something else must go out. So, I've created a cheat sheet that saves me some of those trips to the documentation. I'm hoping that others might find it helpful too

He mentions a few things that make the sheet particularly useful - signatures for the functions are included but not the type info for the parameters, a list of PHPTYPE constants, FETCH constants (for the return type) and CURSOR constants (for defining cursor return type). You can see a preview of it here (as a PNG) and grab the actual sheet here as a PDF.

Continuing in his SQL Server driver series, Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog about handling authentication with the integrated Windows support that makes connecting to a server simpler.

I must confess that when I first tried using Windows authentication with the driver, I was puzzled. I was logged in to my computer as Microsoftbrian.swan, and I know that is a valid login for my database server. [...] he syntax for using Windows Authentication with the driver was easy, but understanding what identity was being used in the connection attempt was confusing.

He finally figured it out, though - the identity of the user on the connection would always be the user the web server was running as. With this knowledge, he was then able to look into other options that he could use to fine tune the connection with the FastCGI component and its impersonation abilities.

Brian Swan has posted a new guide for those wanting to get started using the SQL Server driver for PHP in their application development. His target of choice for the example is a SQL Server Express database.

I'll build a web page that exposes enough of the driver functionality for you to understand the basics of connecting to a server, inserting and retrieving data, and handling errors. A quick note about simplicity: The web page I'll build in this post is very simple '" it's just a simple form, really. It collects information about people who are registering for some fictional event. I'm intentionally keeping it very simple so I can focus on the PHP code for using the driver.

He walks you through the full process - everything from the installation of the driver to creating the database and, finally, building the page that connects to the SQL Server database and inserts/selects data from the sample table.

On his IIS blog today Don Raman has posted a guide to working with the Microsoft SQL Server driver with PHP (on Windows).

Today I am going to explain basics of developing PHP application on Microsoft SQL Server. Let me start by stating one thing, developing PHP application on Microsoft SQL Server is really easy. The extension which glues the two world namely PHP and Microsoft SQL Server is called 'Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP'.

He lists some of the features of the driver (Microsoft-supported, both thread and non-thread safe releases, a team surrounding its development and a manual/blog/forum for active participation) and the one-line call you'll need to get it up and running on your installation.

Chris Jones has officially launched the latest OCI8 (Oracle) drivers for PHP - version 1.4.0 Alpha:

I just released an Alpha version of PECL OCI8 1.4 on http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 The code is also merged to what will eventually be the PHP 5.3.2 and PHP 6.0 releases. Documentation will appear on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php in the next few days, if all goes according to plan.

Updates in this alpha release include a few new connection attribute functions, a change in the driver name for 11gRD2 connections and a correction of a bug in the oci_bind_by_name error handling.

Juozas Kaziukenas (thanks to his work in the WinPHP Challenge) has posted his look at using the SQL native driver to allow the Zend Framework to interact with a MSSQL database backend.

Now some of these issues [that Stuart Herbert pointed out] are fixed, however Microsoft native Sql driver is still not used. [...] However, none of these is available in Zend Framwork. So my task now (because of Winphp competition) is to come up with something what can be used to connect to Microsft Sql database with the new driver.

He looks at how to set up two different options for a database configuration: with a PDO_ODBC adapter and an adapterNamespace setting to define the adapter type to use and the other with an MSSQL adapter type.

In this new entry to his Oracle blog Chris Jones explains some of the prompts you're given when you go to install the latest OCI8 drivers for PHP.

There's two versions - the short one that runs through a basic install, grabbing the package and change up your config and the other that talks about how to pull down and configure a certain version of the need comes up.

You can find out more about this updated package on its PECL page and the Changelog for anything more specific.

The Internet Super Hero blog has posted some statistics comparing the connections per second that can be made with the newly introduced persistent connection support coming with PHP 5.3 in the mysqli (ext/mysqli) driver.

Persistent Connections have been a mixed bag. They can give you a significant performance boost by caching (pooling) connections although MySQL is already comparatively fast at establishing connections. However,connections are stored "as-is" in the cache. They are not "cleaned up".

The ext/mysqli driver takes care of this and a few other problems surrounding the persistent connections by cleaning up things like rolling back active transactions, unlocking tables, closing prepared statements and closing handlers. The trick is in a call to the C-API function mysql_change_user() (= COM_CHANGE_USER).