Re: Re: ODBC or MS SQL DLL? WAS: Using PHP on Server 2003...

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 14:52, Robert Twitty wrote: > The best extension for accessing MS SQL Server is the odbtp extension at > http://odbtp.sourceforge.net. The odbc and mssql extensions > both have > limitations when used with SQL Server 2000. > > mssql ext: > - Uses the obsolete, unsupported and non thread safe DB-Library. > - Does not support varchar(>255), nvarchar and ntext fields. Just tried this out, and indeed the driver just returned a string with lenght 255 when I in fact returned a string of 1000 chars. That is a sever problem for me, since I frequently needs to return strings much longer than 255 characters. Bad, bad, bad... Is there absolutely now way to change this? > - Cannot use FOR XML clause in SQL. > > odbc ext: > - Uses ODBC 2 instead of ODBC 3. > - Does not provide support for stored procedures. > - Does not support nvarchar and ntext fields. I don't uses ODBC for other reasons: Is imply does not trust it reliability to transport large data sets - sometimes ODBC drops rows without any particular reason and without raising an error - and as such fault can't naturally not be encountered. > The odbtp extension is considerably faster than the odbc extension, and is > just as fast as the mssql extension. It also provides support for all of > the mssql_* functions, which means it can be used as a "seemless" > replacement for the mssql extension. And, unlike the odbc and mssql > extensions, the behaviour of the odbtp extension is the same on Linux/UNIX > platforms. I'll have a look at this. Anyhow, thanks for your feedback, it was very helpfully.