FreeTDS Development Group

["Bill Sim" <BSim AT navman.com>]

The issue was resolved by rebuilding apache and php from source rather
than rpm installation... Thanks for the help, it got me going in the
right direction. 

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Fazekas
Sent: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 4:11 p.m.
To: FreeTDS Development Group
Subject: Re: [freetds] Connecting to SQL Server using PHP


On Jul 20, 2005, at 4:18, Bill Sim wrote:

> Then I try to run a query but the
> query fails with the message: DB Error: unknown error, which is not
> particularly useful as you can imagine.

Even less useful to us if you don't give us some more information to  
go on.

I don't have any experience using the pear DB abstraction layer  
myself, but looking at its web page,
http://pear.php.net/package/DB
...it seems it could go through both the mssql or odbc extensions.
Which one are you trying to use?
Show us some example of what kind of code you've got.

Also, how did you install the aforementioned extensions for php,  
either mssql or odbc? Did you compile your own copy or was it a pre- 
compiled binary?

Check that they are properly loaded. For example do a
print_r(get_loaded_extensions());
Is odbc in the list? Is mssql in the list?

The quickest way to find the cause of a problem is to narrow it down  
as much as possible.

Some of the ways to do that:
- Try things without using the DB abstraction layer; going directly  
with the odbc_* or mssql_* functions as detailed in the PHP Manual.

- Try getting Apache out of the picture. If you have shell access to  
the server and it's got a properly installed cli SAPI version of php,  
you could simply try running your scripts there with
php /path/to/your/script.php

- Enable FreeTDS' logging facilities by setting the TDSDUMP  
environment variable to a writable file name. This is where the  
earlier step, getting Apache out of the way, could simplify things  
tremendously. Setting that environment variable in the right place so  
that it takes effect in time is not the easiest task when going  
through Apache. If you have shell access, you could even conveniently  
direct logging to stdout, thereby eliminating possible access right  
problems:
TDSDUMP=stdout php /path/to/your/script.php

If that doesn't result in a bunch of lines related to FreeTDS  
outputted when you try to run your database-accessing script, FreeTDS  
didn't even get involved yet.

--
fds