06 August 2010, 12:04

Microsoft's PHP driver for SQL Server goes object-oriented

There have been previous PHP connections to various databases, but in contrast to ODBC or Perl's DBI, for example, these interfaces have been product-specific, with the result that developers have had to use different routines depending on the database.

This changed about six years ago with the introduction of PHP Data Objects (PDO) in PHP 5. It offers an object-oriented API which broadly abstracts from the underlying database. Like ODBC and DBI, it is a pure SQL interface, not an object-relational mapper.

Microsoft has now released a PDO version of its open source PHP driver for SQL Server. Version 2.0 of the interface still allows previous functionality to be used, but adds in PDO alternatives. A blog posting by Microsoft's Brian Swan explores the details of the implementation and the design decisions made. As Swan explains, some decisions were influenced by difficulties in interpreting the PDO documentation.

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