With all the snow in Seattle this week (I know people in the mid-west and on the east coast are laughing at me when I say that), I feel out of sync. I’m sure I’ve missed lots of interesting links this week…I should have plenty of time...

In this post, I’ll add to my slowly growing series that elaborates on the connection options for the SQL Server Driver for PHP . This time I’ll focus on the CharacterSet option. This is the option that specifies how data will be encoded when...

In this week’s list, be sure to look at the comprehensive list of conferences if you haven’t already made your conference plans for the year. There’s also some good links that are helpful in learning about testing, but maybe nobody needs...

When I’ve asked people about their strategies for preventing SQL injection, one response is sometimes “I use stored procedures.” But, stored procedures do not , by themselves, necessarily protect against SQL injection . The usefulness...

Earlier this month I attended the monthly meeting of the Seattle PHP Meetup Group . In ways I didn’t expect, it was a very interesting meeting. The content itself was interesting enough (we were talking about database design), but what I found even...

In categorizing this week’s links, I was reluctant to put so many interesting links into the Miscellaneous category because I sometimes think of miscellaneous as implying a lack of importance . But note, that thought is wrong! Miscellaneous means...

This is short post to address a frustration I’ve seen mentioned on Twitter and in forums a lot: By default, the SQL Server Driver for PHP returns datetime columns as PHP DateTime objects, not strings. This can be especially frustrating if you are...

Once again, here’s the highlights of what I read this week. As I call out in one point below, I’m sure I’m missing some good stuff…would be interested in what readers have come across this week they find worth sharing. Microsoft...

This post is a follow up to a post I did last week: Paging Data with the SQL Server Drivers for PHP: Simplified . In that post, I showed how to leverage scrollable cursors to simplify code for paging data. However, my investigation used only one type...