FreeTDS Development Group

[Daniel Fazekas <fdsubs AT axelero.hu>]

> > > If I want the freetds supports the following databases:
> > > 1, MySQL
> > :-O... FreeTDS support Sybase (ASE/ASA) and Microsoft SQL Server. If 
> > you
> > want to access all these DB in a portable way you can use ODBC and
> > related drivers.
> Dear freddy77,
> Does the ODBC or which related drivers support with php for all these
> database systems ?
> Thank for your tell !

You have to decide whether you want to use

a) a completely different set of functions to access each of the 
different databases
b) some kind of a database abstraction layer

PHP has native support for all of the DBMS you listed, so you could do 
what most people do when portability between different databases is not 
a priority and use those:

http://www.php.net/mysql
http://www.php.net/pgsql
http://www.php.net/oci8
http://www.php.net/sybase
http://www.php.net/mssql

Each of these except for MySQL require you to have some kind of 
database client libraries installed on your system before you can build 
the PHP extensions. Normally these are provided by the database vendor, 
however, Microsoft not too surprisingly has no intentions of supporting 
any other platform besides Windows. That's exactly where FreeTDS fills 
the void.

After you gathered all the necessary client libraries and have a PHP 
which now supports the native interfaces of each, you can still go with 
one of the many database abstraction layers. In fact, the existence of 
the native interfaces is a prerequisite for most.

The official ones are:
http://www.php.net/dbx
http://pear.php.net/package/DB

There are numerous unofficial ones as well.

And then we have ODBC, a somewhat different kind of beast. Instead of 
the former client libraries, you need ODBC drivers and an ODBC driver 
manager such as unixODBC.

The ODBC drivers are again usually provided by the database vendor, 
albeit most often as a separate download available from their website, 
eg. MyODBC for MySQL. FreeTDS also doubles as a suitable ODBC driver 
for Sybase and MS SQL Server.

After this, you can use the ODBC extension in PHP:
http://www.php.net/odbc


In the end you have so many choices it's almost a classic case of too 
much of a good thing.

--
fds