MSSQL Query issue in PHP and querying text data

Question

I\'m trying a query in PHP to connect and extract data from a MSSQL EXPRESS (2008 R2) database. But i\'m getting an error when i\'m pulling ntext based data from the DB.

Answer 1

Couple of options from the comments on the mssql_query() manual page

• SELECT CAST(field1 AS TEXT) AS field1 FROM table
• Chang the version in /etc/freetds.conf from 4.2 to 8.0 (if the PHP server is *nix)
• Avoid SELECT * queries

Plenty more if you search ntext on that page.

Answer 2

Here are some things you might need to know:

1. Install mssql support for Debian (Lenny/Squeeze):

   apt-get install php5-sybase

2. When you got this error message: "Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier."

   In /etc/freetds/freetds.conf add these two lines (last two):

   [global]
   ;tds version = 4.2
   tds version = 8.0
   client charset = UTF-8
   

   You can edit "charset" in php.ini too (but you don't need if you did it previously in freetds.conf): ; Specify client character set.. ; If empty or not set the client charset from freetds.comf is used ; This is only used when compiled with FreeTDS

   mssql.charset = "UTF-8"
   

3. Use nchar/nvarchar/ntext column types if you need unicode support.

Answer 3

In my case, I needed to install:

sudo apt-get install php-sybase

And modify the /etc/freetds.conf file:

...
[global]
    # TDS protocol version
;   tds version = 4.2
tds version = 8.0
client charset = UTF-8
...