It’s been a while since I’ve touched on the issue of having PHP 5.3 talk to a MS SQL Server on IIS (without using ODBC or other connection methods).  Last time I’ve mentioned that Microsoft has an official SQL Server Driver (v1.0) for PHP to talk to a SQL Server only to find that it doesn’t work for PHP pre-v5.3, which, we didn’t really need anyway because PHP already came with a MS SQL Library driver (which was removed from 5.3) that somewhat works.

However, after starting to play around with PHP 5.3 with SQL Server again I’ve noticed that Microsoft finally release v1.1 of the SQL Server Driver, one that was stated to work with PHP 5.3 on IIS. Lo and behold, I was finally able to get it to work.  Even better, the package also came with an offline documentation on installing the driver and the whole API Reference.  Very nice.  For those who are interested, here is the documentation online, the lo-bandwidth version (no MS Frames):
SQL Server Driver v1.1 for PHP

Note that if your SQL Server is on another server from the PHP server, you’ll also need to install the SQL Native Client data access library on the PHP server.  (If it is on the same server, the installation of SQL Server already installs this package.)  It is highly recommended to use the latest version that works with SQL Server 2008.  It took me a while to find it (the 2005 version link is rampantly posted everyhere), but you can find it officially here:
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, August 2008

Near the bottom of the page you’ll find “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client”.  Get the one that’s appropriate for your machine.  Despite it saying 2008, it should be backwards compatible with earlier versions of SQL Server.  I’ve tried it as far as SQL Server 2000 (on IIS 6.0) and was able to connect and query successfully (I haven’t tested for limitations and such, if any.)

And there you have it.  The official method to talk to a MS SQL Server on IIS with PHP 5.3, straight from Microsoft themselves.

Updated: October 09, 2009
The version of the SQL Driver 1.1 that was released in August was a preview release version.  Microsoft officially released the final version of SQL Server Driver 1.1 on October 6th.

With the release of PHP 5.3.0 introducing a lot of new features and bug fixes, it also comes in with a lot of changes for Microsoft IIS users.  The biggest one of them is the way that PHP is now installed on IIS.  The PHP 5.3 package now no longer provides an ISAPI DLL file (which I’ve been using).  The only way to do it is through CGI, in which you should (have to?) use the FastCGI module.  Depending on which version of IIS you have, the setup will be different.  (I have IIS 6.0 on a Windows 2003 server).  Microsoft seems to have gotten more close with Zend recently and provided better support on IIS that they even have a dedicated website for installing PHP on IIS and providing community support.  Everything you need to know for installing PHP on IIS is on that website.  PHP also now have a website dedicated to supporting PHP on Windows, regardless of whether you’re using IIS or Apache on Windows.

One of the big drawbacks I’ve found was that PHP decided to remove the MS SQL Server connection driver in the PHP 5.3 package.  Just adding back in the DLLs from the old PHP packages back in the PHP directory did not work for me.  Not only did they make it harder for IIS users to install PHP, they had to make it harder for those to connect to MS SQL Server.  Upon doing some online searches, the driver used in PHP was very old (which explains my post on trying to get it to work properly on previous versions of PHP).  Microsoft now has it’s own version of MS SQL Server driver (2005 and above) for PHP.  I have yet to install it, but it would have to be done on a development environment to redo any code using PHP’s old connection library.  I’ve also yet to find any documentation on it so I’m not sure of the details of the driver.

Update: September 24, 2009
Maybeme compiled a php_mssql.dll that works in the VC9 version of PHP 5.3. Note that the ntwdblib.dll files is still necessary. I haven’t gotten it to work personally, but it seems others have, so I’m sharing it for others who wants to try.

Download here: php_mssql.dll (right-click > Save Link As…)