We are pleased to announce the next preview release for the Microsoft PHP Drivers for SQL Server, version 5.7.1-preview. This preview release has been built with PHP 7.2+ and tested on all supported platforms.

Notable items about this release include:

Added

• Support for PHP 7.4
• Support for Red Hat 8 and macOS Catalina (10.15)
• Feature Request #1018 - support for PHP extended string types - Pull Request #1043
• Always Encrypted with secure enclaves, which requires MS ODBC Driver 17.4+ and SQL Server 2019

Removed

• Dropped support for PHP 7.1

Fixed

• Issue #1027 - Fixed how drivers handle query timeout settings
• Pull Request #1049 - performance improvement for fetching from tables with many columns - cached the derived php types with column metadata to streamline data retrieval

Limitations

• No support for inout / output params when using sql_variant type
• No support for inout / output params when formatting decimal values
• In Linux and macOS, setlocale() only takes effect if it is invoked before the first connection. Attempting to set the locale after connecting will not work
• Always Encrypted requires MS ODBC Driver 17+
  • Only Windows Certificate Store and Azure Key Vault are supported. Custom Keystores are not yet supported
  • Issue #716 - With Always Encrypted enabled, named parameters in subqueries are not supported
  • Issue #1050 - With Always Encrypted enabled, insertion requires the column list for any tables with identity columns
  • Always Encrypted limitations

Known Issues

• Data Classification metadata retrieval requires ODBC Driver 17.4.2.1+ and SQL Server 2019
• Connection pooling on Linux or macOS is not recommended with unixODBC < 2.3.7
• When pooling is enabled in Linux or macOS
  • unixODBC <= 2.3.4 (Linux and macOS) might not return proper diagnostic information, such as error messages, warnings and informative messages
  • due to this unixODBC bug, fetch large data (such as xml, binary) as streams as a workaround. See the examples here

Survey

Let us know how we are doing and how you use our drivers by taking our pulse survey:

Install

• On Linux and macOS run the commands below: sudo pecl install sqlsrv-5.7.1preview sudo pecl install pdo_sqlsrv-5.7.1preview
• To download Windows DLLs for PHP 7.2 or above from the PECL repository, please navigate to SQLSRV or PDO_SQLSRV.