How can I connect to Sql Server from a Mac with PHP PDO?

Question

If you search Google for this question, you will find a lot of incorrect, misleading, and outdated information. Surprisingly, there isn't a solid answer on Stack Overflow, so we should change that.

I am using the Mac port installation of Apache and PHP. I have installed php5-mssql, and I can see mssql on my phpinfo() page.

But I don't see it listed under PDO.

PDO support enabled PDO drivers     dblib, mysql, odbc, pgsql  

Is mssql not associated with PDO? Is there another driver that can be used on a Mac to connect to a SqlServer database using PDO? Seems like this is something that should be possible.

Answer 1

Does this help you?

http://blog.nguyenvq.com/2010/05/16/freetds-unixodbc-rodbc-r/

I use FreeTDS to connect to Microsoft SQL servers from a Linux server and it looks like the person in the link above has used FreeTDS to connect from a Mac.

Here is my /etc/freetds/freetds.conf file (the only part I added was at the very end for the XYZ server):

[global]         # TDS protocol version ;       tds version = 4.2          # Whether to write a TDSDUMP file for diagnostic purposes         # (setting this to /tmp is insecure on a multi-user system) ;       dump file = /tmp/freetds.log ;       debug flags = 0xffff          # Command and connection timeouts ;       timeout = 10 ;       connect timeout = 10          # If you get out-of-memory errors, it may mean that your client         # is trying to allocate a huge buffer for a TEXT field.           # Try setting 'text size' to a more reasonable limit          text size = 64512  # Define a connection to the MSSQL server. [xyz]         host = xyz         port = 1433         tds version = 8.0 

[Edit by the asker]

FreeTDS configuration is the first half of the answer. Once it's configured you should be able to run something like this from the command line and connect:

tsql -S xyz -U username -P password 

Then you need to use dblib, not mssql, as the PDO driver:

$pdo = new PDO("dblib:host=$dbhost;dbname=$dbname",                 "$dbuser","$dbpwd"); 

Where $dbhost is the name from the freetds.conf file