Earlier this month Microsoft contributed a SQL Server Driver for PHP. They even have a SQL Server and PHP blog and their SQL Server forum now lists as PHP in their client list. The blog has an interesting post on development of the driver.
So, what does this thing do? It is for PHP5 only (not a big deal considering PHP4 will only be getting security updates after this year) on Windows (this part is a bummer, but not surprising) to access SQL Server 2000 and 2005 (anyone running anything older than that in production?).
You could work with SQL Server from PHP prior to this using FreeTDS. I’ve used the mssql_* PHP functions backed by FreeTDS on FreeBSD for years so this new driver from Microsoft isn’t a major game changer at this point.
That said, I find this a pretty exciting development.
Microsoft is actually providing a PHP library to work with some of their own software. I think that is great, although the really huge win would have been if it was available for non-Microsoft operating systems. This is great stuff though, not just talk, but real live code. Combining this with better PHP on IIS support I have a glimmer of hope that we’ll see more good things from Microsoft for PHP.
There has been plenty of PR about Microsoft doing more in this area, but providing real code and tools is what we actually need.