Zach Skyles Owens

Stayed tuned…  Within the next week or so the SDS team will be publishing more details on what TSQL features will be supported.  There are three basic categories:

• Supported
• Partially Supported
• Unsupported

As you might expect, most DML is Support, a lot of Manageability stuff is Unsupported and certain DDL clauses fall into the Partially Supported category.

I’ll follow-up once the details are released.

Nigel is one of the coolest technical people I know when it comes to having great conversations about technology.  I had the opportunity to interview him last month which you can checkout here on Channel 9.

I’ve been working on SQL Server and SQL Data Services evangelism for the past year and half…  There was a period of time when SDS didn’t look much like SQL Server so telling the story of how SDS fit into the Microsoft Data Platform was much more difficult.  With today’s announcement about the changes to SDS things are starting to look the same.

The basic principle is that SDS is now a full relational database in the cloud.  We get all of the same high-availability and automatic scale that SDS has always promised with the common database programming paradigms we all know and love: tables, triggers, stored procs, foreign keys…

I recorded an interview with Nigel Ellis, SDS Architect, which we’ll be publishing on Channel 9 shortly after mix.

We are really excited about the progress of PHP 5.3 release.  This is a milestone release for PHP on Windows as libraries are being brought up to date, PHP Core developers can use the Visual Studio 9 compiler and performance will be greatly improved.

Unfortunately, the current SQL Server Driver for PHP v1.0 does not support PHP 5.3 and will cause IIS to crash.  You will end up seeing something like this.

HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error

C:\php\php-cgi.exe - The FastCGI process exited unexpectedly 

Followed by a Microsoft Windows error box.

CGI / FastCGI stopped working and was closed.

The dev team responsible for the SQL Server Driver for PHP is hard at work on v1.1 which will support PHP 5.3.  Please add their blog to your favorite RSS reader http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlphp.

I was banging my head against a wall for a while today trying to track down a issue that wasn’t letting my PHP 5.2.8 app do a basic connection to SQL Server 2008.  I kept getting the following error.

SQLSTATE: IM002
message: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified

I have SQL Server 2008 Express installed on my Windows Server 2008 workstation so I didn’t think I would have any issues like this.  To fix it all I had to do was install the SQL Server 2005 ODBC Driver from here which is part of the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client.

Talking to the PM for our driver it sounds like the next version will have a more explicit error making this much easier to diagnose.