So last time I left this blog I was struggling with getting PHP to be able to run queries on MSSQL at the university. This turned out to be considerably more complicated than I first though.

The first issue I came across was that the University was running PHP on an IIS web-server. I have never really used PHP on IIS before and there are a couple of small but important differences. Thankfully these didn’t hold me up for too long. When my first few tests of connection strings didn’t work I began to research this on the web to see what methods worked for others. Having tried many permutations and combinations of methods I found online I eventually found some articles suggesting that this was due to a driver issue.

http://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/connecting-php-iis-6-and-sql-server-2005-129/

Unfortunately the technicians for the CMIS computer suit were not too interested in installing these as they had a known setup.

With a little more research I then found an article suggesting that the reason the connection wasn’t working was because of a change to default network settings for SQL Server 2005 over 2000.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=227248&messageID=2266046

Clearly, again the computing staff were not keen on changing their setup, but did agree to help me debug this. I wrote a test script which would confirm the connection when run and the technicians build two virtual servers for testing. After making the suggested changes still it didn’t work.

I left this with the technician for a week or so to see if he could come up with a solution. Unfortunately at current there still isn’t one.

Thankfully this doesn’t spell the end for my research, like any good student I had a backup plan. This involves taking an old dev machine of my own and installing Server 2003, a web server and SQL server 2005 all from the universities MSDN subscription. As of current I have the Server 2003 installed, Apache installed, PHP, install but not yet fully working and SQL server installed and working.

Once I get PHP up and running i hope to be able to go back to connection strings. As they are now on the same server and I can tweak the setup all I like without the university’s restrictions this should progress quickly and I hope to have a working connection by the end of the week.

Of course, connection issues are not the old thing this solution solves. You see, my project relies heavily on me being able to accurately benchmark my system to ensure I am getting the performance gains I am after. If I was to be running this on the university setup I would have an unknown load on the server at any one time. This is because the university web server is connected to the Internet. As such I would never be able to have the controlled environment I require for benchmarking.

On Monday morning (AKA, first day back) I went and spoke to Brian Spencer to make my pitch to him. He was fairly impressed and most importantly, interested in my idea. He has said he will take it on and I just need to send him a project summary and he will confirm. I have written most of the summary now, just playing with some of the details.

So, I would like to try and explain what my project actually is so that later comments should mean more to people.

CMS’s (Content Management Systems) are some form of web based application which allows pages to be generated from database content. So normally you see something like index.php?id=42 in a URL. This means the variable “42″ is being passed into the script. Some checks are performed on it to make sure it is a valid number etc and then it collects the content (title, page details, place in the menu etc) from the database, and using that constructs the page using some form of template and gives it back to you.

So this means the page you are viewing doesn’t actually exist as a file, but it is generated from database content. The real beauty of this system is that means you can write an admin interface which can edit this content in the database and as such, non technical people can update pages.

This is all very well and normally such a system does all the logic (so, checking if the ID is a number, not text, dealing with errors like that ID that was requested not being in the database). This means you have a database that is just used for storing data and an application in something like C# or PHP that does all the “thought”.

Now modern database systems have basically become programming languages in their own right. They have a log of powerful functionality in them.

My project aims to research moving this balance of power and functionality from the application to the database and getting the database system itself to do some of the “thought” and not just mindlessly passing data back.

This is a research project mainly because I have some idea of how much this can be done and how to do it, but really, I’m not aware of this being done before and everyone I have talked to about it who has any idea what I’m talking about agrees this is an interesting concept and I would be nice to see how far it can be pushed, but really, we have no idea.

For now thought I just need to start with the basics. I need to have PHP (my chosen language) connecting and talking to MSSQL (my chosen database system) before I can go much further. This is proving more challenging than first thought. Watch this space….

This is an almost unheard of subject as far as I know and as such I hope that at the very least it will provide some original work and an insight into the hidden power of T-SQL and database servers in general that is often kept locked away.

I plan to be focusing on MSSQL as it is the system I am most familiar with of the 3 major database engines (DB2 and Oracle being the other two).