Dec 1, 2010 12:40 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has released an update designed to fix a number of issues in the most recent release of the company’s drivers designed to allow PHP developers to build applications that can connect seamlessly with SQL Server databases. The Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server update went live at the end of the past month and is now available via the Microsoft Download Center.

Of course, as it is the case with older Drivers for PHP for SQL Server releases the latest refresh can be grabbed at no charge.

Ashay Chaudhary, Program Manager – PHP SQL Server enumerated the main issues that were resolved with the update:

“•Long column names allowed by SQL Server (up to 128 characters) were incorrectly truncated to 29 chars. Any application that attempted to use column names allowed by SQL Server stopped working. The update release correctly handles column names up to 128 characters.

•PDO::quote() added a null terminator to the end of the string. The update release does not add a null terminator to the end of the quoted string.

•An error could occur when binding null data to server columns of type varbinary, binary, or varbinary(max). The update release will not throw an error if one specifies binary encoding (PDO::SQLSRV_ENCODING_BINARY) using the $driver_options parameter of PDOStatement::bindParam().

•An access violation could occur in the error handler routine for some error cases, causing the PHP process to abruptly stop. These error handler routines in the update release will no longer cause an access violation.”

Customers that experienced any of the problems mentioned above need to make sure that they download and start leveraging the updated version of the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server as soon as possible.

According to the Redmond company version 2.0 of the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server has been well received by PHP developers.

Chaudhary underlined that the refresh is only designed to fix the issues that the software giant deemed a priority, and in this regard, customers might still experience additional problems.

“Do note that since the number of fixes are small, we have updated only the Product/File version of the driver binaries from 2.0.1426.0 (version 2.0 released August 5) to 2.0.1802.200 (version 2.0.1 released November 30),” Chaudhary explained.