PHP and MS SQL 2000

Anon

I would like to know if MS SQL 2000 works with PHP and if it works, how can I connect PHP under Linux into a SQL 2000 database.
Thanks 🙂

Anon

MS SQL Server 2000 mostly works with PHP...

BUT

There is a serious bug returning long data from varchar and text columns which means you cannot get more than 255 characters at a time! you have to use something like -

Select substring(c1, 1, 255) as p1, substring(c2, 256, 255) as p2 ... etc and then concatonate the bits together.

Needless to say, this sucks.

hobbyman

There is a library file called FreeTDS that
allows you to connect to MSSQL via PHP from
Linux.

The web site is www.freetds.org.

And as far as I know you won't have any
problems with data being truncated. Our
application is making use of several TEXT
fields and is working fine.

Anon

Yes, you can get long data from varchar. Try this:

SELECT CONVERT(TEXT,longTextField) FROM yourTable

:=)

Anon

NIce hack!

I wish I had known about this last week when I discovered the problem and nearly died of freight! I was close to a big delivery and had to find a solution.

Your solution is much better and I have changed my code to use it. Thanks.

Jonathon, perhaps you could help me with another problem I have had relating to MSSQL and convert?

I want to use a timestamp in a "where" clause to implement optimistic locking from PHP. I want to use an query like "update t1 ... where timestamp='$oldts'". Although PHP appears to have a reasonable hex string for timestamp value, this never works.

I have tried "..where timestamp='0x$oldts'" and that fails also.

Finally, I tried using convert(timestamp, '$oldts') but that fails too.

Do you have any idea about how to pass a timestamp back to a query from PHP?