Update release of the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server

The recent version 2.0 of the driver has been very well received, with a fair amount of activity on our forum. Our team has been actively engaged with providing support to our developer community to adopt this version – especially the PDO driver.

Based on the issues reported so far, we found that a few critical bugs slipped thru our testing net, root caused them and then spent some time understanding their impact. After the due diligence, we have narrowed the list of bugs down to those that have broad impact and fixed them in this update release. They are:

• Long column names allowed by SQL Server (up to 128 characters) were incorrectly truncated to 29 chars. Any application that attempted to use column names allowed by SQL Server stopped working. The update release correctly handles column names up to 128 characters.
• PDO::quote() added a null terminator to the end of the string. The update release does not add a null terminator to the end of the quoted string.
• An error could occur when binding null data to server columns of type varbinary, binary, or varbinary(max). The update release will not throw an error if one specifies binary encoding (PDO::SQLSRV_ENCODING_BINARY) using the $driver_options parameter of PDOStatement::bindParam().
• An access violation could occur in the error handler routine for some error cases, causing the PHP process to abruptly stop. These error handler routines in the update release will no longer cause an access violation.

These are also listed in the readme file included in our download package. Do note that since the number of fixes are small, we have updated only the Product/File version of the driver binaries from 2.0.1426.0 (version 2.0 released August 5) to 2.0.1802.200 (version 2.0.1 released November 30). In addition to the package on the MSDN Download Center, we have also updated the package used by the Web Platform Installer.

In addition to the additional testing coverage from some of our close partners, we also gave this update release additional test coverage at the recent SQL Server JumpIn! Camp I blogged about yesterday.

We are confident that this update release is more stable and recommend all our customers to upgrade to this release very soon.

We thank you all for your continued support,

Ashay Chaudhary
Program Manager – PHP SQL Server