In the many years I’ve been using the traditional LAMP stack, I’ve successfully managed to avoid having anything to do with MS SQL server. Until 2016. This year I’ve had to work quiet a bit with it – administration, backups and, now, scripted queries from Linux with PHP.
I suspect I’m (a) lucky I haven’t had to do this before now; and (b) that Azure seems to have pushed Microsoft into greater Linux based support for MS SQL. The evidence? This open source Mircosoft repository with a MS SQL PHP binary driver for Linux released just a few months ago.
NB: installing the Microsoft PHP driver is different to installing the Microsoft ODBC driver for SQL Server on Linux. These may even be incompatible.
For me, I just took a standard Ubuntu 16.04 install (64bit obviously) with PHP 7.0 and downloaded the latest MS PHP SQL extension (for me, at time of writing, this was 4.0.6. When you untar the Ubuntu16.tar file, copy the .so files to /usr/lib/php/20151012/ and then create a /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/msphpsql.ini file with contents:
extension=php_pdo_sqlsrv_7_nts.so extension=php_sqlsrv_7_nts.so
Note that the tar also contains two ‘ts’ versions of these files. Trying to use those resulted in errors. Link this for Apache2 / CLI as required. E.g. for PHP CLI:
cd /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d/ ln -s ../../mods-available/msphpsql.ini 20-msphpsql.ini
You can confirm it’s working via:
$ php -i | grep sqlsrv Registered PHP Streams => https, ftps, compress.zlib, php, file, glob, data, http, ftp, sqlsrv, phar PDO drivers => sqlsrv pdo_sqlsrv pdo_sqlsrv support => enabled pdo_sqlsrv.client_buffer_max_kb_size => 10240 => 10240 pdo_sqlsrv.log_severity => 0 => 0 sqlsrv sqlsrv support => enabled sqlsrv.ClientBufferMaxKBSize => 10240 => 10240 sqlsrv.LogSeverity => 0 => 0 sqlsrv.LogSubsystems => 0 => 0 sqlsrv.WarningsReturnAsErrors => On => On
And, finally, for using it, following the the sample scripts from the repository worked a charm.