This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We recently released the next preview of the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server, version 5.9.0-preview1. This preview release has been built with PHP 7.2+ and tested on all supported platforms.

 

Notable items about this release include:

 

Added

Removed

  • Dropped support for Ubuntu 19.10 and Debian 8.

Fixed

  • Pull Request #1127 – removal of TSRMLS macros in preparation for PHP 8 by remicollet
  • Pull Request #1136 – improved performance when handling decimal numbers as inputs or outputs and removed unncessary conversions for numeric values
  • Pull Request #1143 – if an exception occurs when executing a query, will not change the output parameters
  • Pull Request #1144 – use the correct C types when binding output parameters with integer values
  • Pull Request #1146 – improved performance when fetching numbers using client buffers
  • Pull Request #1165 – setting query timeout without using LOCK TIMEOUT, which saves an extra trip to the server
  • Issue #1170 – when fetching large data types such as ntext will check more than only the display size – pull request #1172

Limitations

  • No support for inout / output params when using sql_variant type
  • No support for inout / output params when formatting decimal values
  • In Linux and macOS, setlocale() only takes effect if it is invoked before the first connection. Attempting to set the locale after connecting will not work
  • Always Encrypted requires MS ODBC Driver 17+
    • Only Windows Certificate Store and Azure Key Vault are supported. Custom Keystores are not yet supported
    • Issue #716 – With Always Encrypted enabled, named parameters in subqueries are not supported
    • Issue #1050 – With Always Encrypted enabled, insertion requires the column list for any tables with identity columns
    • Always Encrypted limitations

Known Issues

  • This preview release requires ODBC Driver 17.4.2 or above. Otherwise, a warning about failing to set an attribute may be suppressed when using an older ODBC driver.
  • Connection pooling on Linux or macOS is not recommended with unixODBC < 2.3.7
  • When pooling is enabled in Linux or macOS:
    • unixODBC <= 2.3.4 (Linux and macOS) might not return proper diagnostic information, such as error messages, warnings and informative messages.
    • due to this unixODBC bug, fetch large data (such as xml, binary) as streams as a workaround. See the examples here.

Survey

Let us know how we are doing and how you use our drivers by taking our pulse survey.

 

Install

  • On Linux and macOS run the commands below:

 

 

sudo pecl install sqlsrv-5.9.0preview1
sudo pecl install pdo_sqlsrv-5.9.0preview​1

 

 

  • To download Windows DLLs for PHP 7.2 or above from the PECL repository, please navigate to SQLSRV or PDO_SQLSRV.
  • Direct downloads for released binaries can also be found at the Github release tag.

 

David Engel

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