Jul 13 2006
PHP with SQL Server Express and Windows 2003
I’ve just set up SQL Server Express on our staging server cause I needed to interface Moodle with a customers existing SQLServer database for authentication.
This wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be, but after some set backs I got it working 
Firstly, TCP connections to SQL Server Express are switched off by default to prevent newbie users opening themselves up to potential remote attack. Here’s a link to instructions on how to enable TCP connections: How to: Configure Express to accept remote connections.
Also note from the comments on the PHP mssql_connect function documentation that the hostname and port in the connection string are delimited using a comma ‘,’ rather than the more common colon ‘:’. E.g.
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mssql_connect(‘localhost,1433′, ‘myusername’, ‘mypass’);
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The first problem I encountered after this was an ‘Unable to connect to server’ error. By scanning the user comments on the PHP mssql_connect function page I noticed that a key step in fixing the problem was to replace the PHP5 provided ntwdblib.dll with a newer one from the MS SQL Client Tools. However, this DLL no longer ships with MS SQL Server Express. Luckily I had a developer installation of SQL Server 2000 on my XP partition and was able to pick up version 2000.80.2039.0 from that.
However, I then ran into another problem. When I replaced the PHP 5 provided version ntwdblib.dll of with the new one and restarted IIS, the output from phpinfo() showed that the mssql extension wasn’t loading anymore. I couldn’t see any errors reported in browser nor the system error logs.
By chance I decided to run php -i on the command line. This was lucky cause this way a system error dialog popped up a warning about a missing DLL dependency.
The problem was that the new ntwdblib.dll had a dependency on MSVCR71.DLL which couldn’t be found in IIS’ path. I did a search for msvcr*.dll in C:\WINDOWS and found a copy of this DLL in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\. I copied it into my PHP install dir and restarted IIS. Then when I ran phpinfo() again the extension showed up.