Microsoft Updates PHP Driver for SQL Server -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Driverby David Ramel

Microsoft Updates PHP Driver for SQL Server

Continuing the company's shift to openness and interoperability, Microsoft yesterday released an updated PHP driver for its flagship Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), SQL Server.

The new driver supports PHP 5.6 and eases working with the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface, described by Wikipedia as "a standard programming language middleware API for accessing database management systems."

"This driver allows developers who use the PHP scripting language to access Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database, and to take advantage of new features implemented in ODBC," Microsoft said in a blog post. "The new version works with Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 or higher."

In January 2013 Microsoft introduced new ODBC drivers for SQL Server in version 11. "Microsoft is adopting ODBC as the de-facto standard for native access to SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Database," the company said at the time. "We have provided longstanding support for ODBC on Windows and, in the SQL Server 2012 time frame, released support for ODBC on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6, and SUSE Enterprise Linux)."

Key new features in the Windows version included driver-aware connection pooling, connection resiliency and asynchronous execution (polling method).

Posted by David Ramel on 03/10/2015

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