We are excited to announce the Release Candidate for SQLSRV and PDO_SQLSRV drivers, supporting the basic CRUD functionalities with Always Encrypted. Both drivers have been built with PHP 7.* and tested on all supported platforms (Windows, Ubuntu 16 & 17, Debian 8 & 9, RedHat 7, SUSE 12, El Capitan and Sierra).

Notable items about the 5.2.0-RC,

Added

• Added support for Ubuntu 17 (requires MSODBC 17 preview)
• Added support for Debian 9 (requires MSODBC 17 preview)

Fixed

• Issue #555 - Hebrew strings truncation (requires MSODBC 17 preview)
• Issue #615 - Added error handling when fetching varchar(max) as a stream with Always Encrypted
• Adjusted precisions for numeric/decimal inputs with Always Encrypted
• Fixed bugs when binding parameters with Always Encrypted
• Fixed warnings as per Prefast code analysis

Limitations

• In Linux and macOS, setlocale() only takes effect if it is invoked before the first connection. The subsequent locale setting will not work
• Always Encrypted functionalities are only supported using MSODBC 17 preview
  • ODBC binaries for macOS available upon request
• MSODBC 17 preview msodbcsql.msi only works for Windows10
• Always Encrypted limitations
• When using sqlsrv_query with Always Encrypted feature, SQL type has to be specified for each input (see here)
• No support for inout / output params when using sql_variant type

Known Issues

• Connection pooling on Linux doesn't work properly if the user uses the MSODBC17 preview
• When pooling is enabled in Linux or MAC
  • unixODBC <= 2.3.4 (Linux and MAC) might not return proper diagnostics 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

Thank you for taking the time to participate in our survey. You can help us improve by letting us know how we are doing and how you use PHP by taking our December pulse survey:

Install

• On Linux and macOS run the commands below: sudo pecl install sqlsrv-5.2.0RC1 sudo pecl install pdo_sqlsrv-5.2.0RC1
• Download Windows binaries from SQLSRV or PDO_SQLSRV PECL repository.