SQL Azure Team Blog : MIX 09

Accessing SDS From PHP

nigele — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:44:00 GMT

Hi folks, this is Nigel Ellis and I’m an architect on the SQL Services team. I’ve just returned from MIX2009 where I announced our new relational service in my What's New with SQL Data Services talk. You can watch the full video and download the slides from here.

During my talk, I demonstrated running an application on Windows Azure using PHP to interact with a database hosted in our new relational SQL data service. I used the unified ODBC support built in to PHP to interact with SDS. I’ve included a sample code snippet below which uses an SDS server server.data.dev.mscds.com:

<?php

$host = "server.data.dev.mscds.com";

$dbname = "database";

$dbuser = "user@server";

$dbpwd = "password";

$driver = "{SQL Server Native Client 10.0}";

// Build connection string

$dsn="Driver=$driver;Server=$host;Database=$dbname;Encrypt=true;TrustServerCertificate=true";

if (!($conn = @odbc_connect($dsn, $dbuser, $dbpwd))) {

die("Connection error: " . odbc_errormsg());

}

// Got a connection, run simple query

if ($qh = @odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT A, B FROM myTable")) {

// Dump query result

$rows = 0;

while ( $row = @odbc_fetch_object($qh) ) {

echo("$rows: $row->A $row->B\r\n");

$rows++;

}

@odbc_free_result($qh);

}

else {

// Error running query

echo("Query error: " . odbc_errormsg($conn));

}

// Free the connection

@odbc_close($conn);

In this example, I’m using the SQL Server native ODBC driver which ships out of band from the operating system. Other driver choices may be used as outlined in the table below.

Item	Comments
Server	Name of the virtual SDS data server to connect to. This takes the form of *servername*.domain_name. In the example, I’m using a virtual server provisioned in the SDS pre-production domain data.dev.mscds.com
Driver	ODBC driver to use: {SQL Server} – Legacy SQL Server driver {SQL Native Client} – SQL 2005 Native Client {SQL Server Native Client 10.0} – SQL 2008 Native Client
Database	Name of the target database to connect to. If left unspecified the connection will default to the master database.
Encrypt	Force use of encryption over TDS – if left unspecified, SDS will force encryption
TrustServerCertificate	Trust the certificate returned by the data service – this is currently required due to implementation restrictions that will be relaxed before we release
UID	Username of the user – form should be user@server. Can be specified in the connection string or as argument to odbc_connect()
PWD	Password of the user account. Can be specified in the connection string or as argument to odbc_connect()

For those familiar with ODBC you’ll note this pattern is also used to connect to a regular SQL Server instance. The only change in the code is the name of the server, use of encryption and the use of SQL standard security (username and password).

In addition to the ODBC driver patterns, there is an open source Native PHP driver for SQL Server. This driver is a native client library built over the SQL 2005 Native Client. Today the driver requires the target SQL server support MARS. This prevents the driver from working with SQL 7.0, 2000 and SQL Data Services as MARS is not supported. The good news is that we’re working with the native driver folks to expose MARS as a configuration option; this support is already provided by the underlying ODBC driver. This change allows the use of the PHP Native driver with SDS without requiring SDS to support MARS.

In the end, you’ll see the patterns used to access SDS are identical to those you use to access SQL Server.

Nigel.

Update from MIX ‘09

davidrob — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:48:00 GMT

Hi! For those who I haven’t met yet, I’m Patric McElroy and I’m the GPM for the SDS team. I’ve been with the team since last summer and it has been an amazing ride so far – lots of progress, lots of learning and lots of cool stuff ahead of us. For most of my career at Microsoft, I’ve worked in the enterprise server space (BizTalk Server, SQL Server) as both a GPM and PUM.

You’ve heard of “Internet Time”? Well, apparently this blog post is on “Vegas Time” – where everything is behind schedule because you got talked into going out after the MIX Influentials Party and are subsequently way behind. Hopefully, the rest will “…stay in Vegas”.

Yesterday was a fun day at MIX ‘09. ScottGu’s keynote was amazing and although it was only a couple of minutes in amongst a 2-hour keynote, ScottGu did talk about the Azure platform announcements with the SDS announcement from last week being a key announcement. Even a week after the original announcement, ScottGu’s mention of it got a smattering of spontaneous applause during the keynote. Scott talked about our plans to support TDS/T-SQL, talked about this as part of the overall database roadmap for the SQL data platform, and emphasized that this enables access from any client library – .Net or OSS. Finally, he emphasized the value proposition for web developers of being able to develop/debug applications locally and then deploy and run them in the cloud. (The Azure platform material starts about 47:30 into the video feed for the Day 1 keynote which can be found here: http://live.visitmix.com/).

I also got pretty excited at many of the other capabilities that were highlighted during the keynote as well. In particular I think that the Windows Web App Gallery will be a great option for developers (see the 10 minutes preceding the SDS material). One thing I’ll take back to the team is to make sure we are doing everything necessary to enable these apps to be built on and leverage SDS. The goal of the gallery is very much in line with the core value prop of SDS v1 of enabling a very friction-free provisioning experience. It would be very cool if developers had an easy way to ensure that their web apps could have the option to provision an SDS database automatically as part of their install.

One of the coolest parts of these conferences is the opportunity to talk with a lot of customers and partners. The response to our plans to accelerate delivery of true relational database capabilities as a service continues to be very positive. On Tuesday night I attended an event hosted by the D&PE group where I spoke with an ISV partner who builds LOB software for the insurance industry that they deliver as a service. Lots of fantastic feedback from someone who currently makes their living building a running services-based software. Their app currently runs on SQL Server which they host in their own datacenters. His initial comment was the most interesting. He said “This is great. This will allow me to consider how and when I can migrate my application to the Azure platform.” I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon talking with press and analysts and the reaction/feedback was the same.

Nigel’s session on SDS is tomorrow (Fri) morning so keep an eye out for the video feed on the above link.

Patric

SQL Data Services – What’s with the silence?

davidrob — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:12:00 GMT

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to drop a quick note. People are starting to question what’s going on in the SDS world and why we have been so silent. Well, to be honest, we have been so silent because the entire team has been heads down adding some new exciting features that customers have been demanding. Last year at Mix we told the world about SDS. This time around we will be unveiling some new features that are going to knock your socks off. So, that’s it for now. Just wanted to let everyone the team is alive and well and super excited for the road ahead. We are 3 weeks away from Mix so hang on just a little bit longer. Trust me, it’s worth it

-Dave