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

Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog : Scrollable results

Working on version 1.1 of the SQL Server Driver for PHP