Working on version 1.1 of the SQL Server Driver for PHP

sqlphp — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:46:00 GMT

The SQL Server Driver for PHP team is hard at work on the version 1.1 of the extension. We've received a lot of feedback for feature requests from PHP developers through the blog, forums, the Seattle PHP meetup group, and various conferences. The most frequent feature requests have been in the following areas:

Support for PHP 5.3
Support for handling UTF-8 strings in parameters and resultset values, without requiring calls to iconv or other extensions
Support for scrollable results and row count

We are working on addressing these feature requests for the next version of the extension.

We are doing some preliminary work to test our existing version 1.0 extension with PHP 5.3 and providing guidance to help developers working with current builds of PHP 5.3 use the version 1.0 extension. Keep an eye on this blog for more information regarding using the version 1.0 driver with PHP 5.3. We expect to fully support PHP 5.3 with version 1.1 of our extension.

For UTF-8 strings, we are working on adding support for this and other character sets to the extension. Having the SQL Server Driver for PHP handle UTF-8 strings means that the extension will handle the translations between UTF-8 and UCS-2 (little endian) since the SQL Server database engine does not currently support the UTF-8 character set. We're working on handling parameters and resultset values using UTF-8, as well as handling the query strings in UTF-8 format.

We are also working on adding scrollable resultset support to the extension. The initial version of the SQL Server Driver for PHP retrieves query results in an unbuffered forward-only mode, an approach that yields the best possible performance for retrieving query results from SQL Server but one where there is no way to know how many rows the resultset contains ahead of time. We are planning on adding support for scrollable resultsets to the extension in version 1.1, giving PHP developers the ability to access any row as well as the ability to determine how many rows are available within the resultset.

David Sceppa

Program Manager - Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP

Functions to return row count and field count

dpblogs — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:50:00 GMT

It’s great to see that people are downloading our the February CTP build of our PHP driver and that we’re getting feedback on our new features. We look forward to more of your feedback and we’re in the process of setting up a new forum specifically for questions and feedback for the PHP driver.

A lot of the feedback has centered around requests for a num_rows function for the PHP driver. In our PHP driver, we’re using the most performant way to retrieve the results of a SQL Server query, a forward-only read-only stream of data. With this approach there’s no way for the driver to know how the total number of rows that the query will return until you’ve finished processing the results of the query. We could offer a num_rows function but without providing buffered resultsets, that num_rows function would only return the number of rows returned so far. While that appears to be a fairly standard behavior for drivers that don’t support buffered resultsets, it doesn’t strike me as adding a great deal of value. With that said, I’m curious as to whether there’s real interest in a num_rows function without adding support for buffered resultsets?

We are planning on adding a function to return the number of fields in a resultset later in this release. There’s a simple workaround in the meantime – use the count function in conjunction with sqlsrv_field_metadata:

$fieldCount = count(sqlsrv_field_metadata($stmt));

The main benefit in adding a function to return this information is that returning the number of fields without generating the field metadata would be more performant.

David Sceppa

Program Manager, SQL Server Driver for PHP

Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog : Row count

Working on version 1.1 of the SQL Server Driver for PHP

Functions to return row count and field count