Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server from PHP in Ubuntu using mssql_connect()

As part of ongoing testing to find the best way of storing large amounts of data we are considering Microsoft SQL Server, which needs to be accessible from our PHP5 application. The site is hosted on Ubuntu Server 10.10, which makes things a little more interesting. We currently use adodb5 to talk to a MySQL server, which works fine, apart from MySQL being far too slow. It is possible to create an ODBC connection in Ubuntu to talk to SQL Server but for testing the speed of our queries I just used mssql_connect(). In the near future I will move the database connection entirely to ODBC/adodb so we don’t have to rewrite any of our existing code.

Ubuntu doesn’t come with the packages needed for mssql_connect() by default so you need to install them:

sudo apt-get install php5-sybase

Then restart the apache server to apply the changes:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you can use mssql_connect and its associated functions in your PHP to connect to your Microsoft SQL Server, as in this example:

ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);
$server = ‘my.server.ip:1433\DATABASEINSTANCE’;
$link = mssql_connect($server, ‘username’, ‘password’);

if (!$link) {
die(‘<br/><br/>Something went wrong while connecting to MSSQL’);
}
else {
$selected = mssql_select_db(“databasename”, $link)
or die(“Couldn’t open database databasename”);
echo “connected to databasename<br/>”;

$result = mssql_query(“select name from table”);

while($row = mssql_fetch_array($result))
echo $row["name"] . “<br/>”;
}

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