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PHP, MS SQL, and Linux

Tags: databases • Categories: Software

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Note: this was a draft from 2009. I never finished documenting everything, and I (thankfully!) no longer have to integrate with the MS SQL database mentioned here. However, I figured I throw this information out there in case someone was running into the same configuration issues I was.

Usually I am lucky enough that most of my clients don’t have many of their internal operations tied into their web site’s databases; if they are using MS SQL or some other database engine that isn’t open source I’m able to easily convince them to transfer their data over to MySQL. Recently I was working with a client where this wasn’t the case, there was no way around it: I would have to integrate with a MS SQL database.

Information on connecting to MS SQL from PHP exists on the web, but most of it is either unclear, incomplete, or outdated. I hope to bundle together most of the information I found into one blog post to make it a bit simpler to compile a custom PHP installation with MS SQL capabilities using the freetds library.

In the PHP installation script I changed/added the freetds installation line to this:

[code lang=”bash”]
SYBASE={$INSTALLDIR}
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:$SYBASE/lib
export SYBASE LD_LIBRARY_PATH

cd ${SRCDIR}/${FREETDS}
./configure –prefix=${INSTALLDIR} –with-tdsver=8.0 –enable–msdblib –enable-sybase-compat
make
make install
[/code]

References: