At 18:38 02.11.2002, Robert Twitty wrote:
I do not like MySQL due to its simplicity and lack of relations. But i mustHello(NOTE: This message was originally posted to PHP-DB, but I was told that PHP-DEV was a more appropriate place) I have been using PHP for about 9 months, and have chosen it as my primary scripting language for web applications. I have and still use ASP and JSP. IMHO, PHP is superior and easier to use than those languages except in one area that is important to me, which is the ability to access MS SQL Server 7.0 / 2000 databases from a UNIX box. "Out of the box" PHP provides great support for MySQL and PostgreSQL, and at this time I have no desire to use them because I do not believe that they are ready for "prime time."
disagree to PHP/Postgres. Postgres IS very stable and fast. Another very important
thing is that any security problem found in postgres is fixed very soon. On the
otherhand there is Microsoft and we have seen in the past that there are a lot of
problems and that it takes some time to get them fixed by MS. Last but not least
i d not like MS products for large server applications for several reasons.
The open source solution that is always recommended for UNIX-based PHP / MS-SQL connectivity is freeTDS, and unfortunately I found it to be quite lacking in its capabilities and useless in certain situations. Another alternative was to use a commercial ODBC driver management system on UNIX. Sadly, it was not in the budget for this endeavor, and the PHP odbc extensions could use some work in terms of ease of use. Because I was determined to use PHP (I really dislike using JSP / JDBC on UNIX, and IIS / ASP is out of the question), I decided to create my own solution. Since I have a substantial amount of experience in programming directly with the Win32 ODBC API and TCP/IP, I decided to create a service that runs on a Win32 platform that can communicate with any platform via TCP/IP. The service uses a "home grown" protocol that allows a client to access any database that the service can see via the ODBC drivers that are installed on the computer which it resides. In other words, it allows a PHP client on UNIX to access a database using the ODBC drivers installed on a Windows NT / 2000 server. It is nothing more than a middle man service for Win32 ODBC. The name of the service is called ODBTP (Open Database Transport Protocol), and no there is not a RFC for this protocol. Thus far, I have successfully accessed MS-SQL, Oracle and Sybase databases via ODBTP. ODBTP consists of a Windows NT / 2000 service application, an ODBTP client library that can be used to create Win32 or UNIX clients, and a PHP extension module that was created with the library. ODBTP has the following features: * Multi-client servicing * True connection pooling (not persistent connections) * Client reserved connections (virtual connections for stateless web clients) * Supports all data types, including nvarchar, ntext, varchar(>255), char(>255), datetime, and bigint. * No big-endian / little-endian problems. * Server-side data binding. * Stored procedure execution, parameter passing (including NULL's) and output retrieval. * Transactions, i.e., supports commits and rollbacks under any transaction isolation level. * UNICODE data is processed using UTF-8 encoding (important since PHP strings are not UNICODE)
did you use mbstring and internal encoding set to utf-8 or ucs-whatever?
* Can retrieve query results sent in XML format. * Verbose error reporting, all ODBC error messages are sent to client. * No discovered memory leaks or buffer overflow possibilities. * Designed to be as easy as possible to use with PHP I am new to this mailing list, and it appears that PHP is predominantly used for MySQL and PostgreSQL, and thus I am not sure if ODBTP is of any interest to most people on this list. My original intent was not to release ODBTP to the public (I really don't have the time to maintain freeware), but if there is a substantial interest I will release it to the public. I am curious to see how well it performs in other environments. -- bob
Sounds interesting to me :-) There is no problem with adding this as a new extension in pecl since all new extensions should be created there. Maybe it is even worth to discuss this belonging to /ext but i doubt. Just ask for approriate CVS account. However, where can one download ODBTP or will be part of the extension build? regards marcus -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
