Posted by Chung Leong on 08/16/06 06:00

The OLE-DB extension allows a PHP application to connect to a OLE-DB
data provider. It's for Win32 only. It's available for PHP 4.3, 4.4,
5.0, and 5.1. You can download it from SourceForge at the following
URL:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=439575&group_id=171247

What is OLE-DB? It's a newish Microsoft technology designed to
supercede ODBC. In addition to RDBMS, it can retrieve information from
such diverse source as Indexing Server and Active Directory.

Why should you care? While PHP applications are usually deployed on a
Linux environment, for intranets Windows is an attractive enough choice
to many people. With this extension you can access functionalities on
are particularly useful for office intranets. Indexing Server, for
example, let you easily implement a document search feature. Through
Active Directory you can retrieve information about people in the
office and so forth.

The extension is still in beta state. I've tested it with the following
providers:

* SQL Server
* Indexing Server
* Active Directory
* MS Access
* MS Excel

It's a fairly extensive framework, so likely bugs will be discovered
with more people kicking the tires. Any feedback will be dearly
appreciated. I will post a couple tutorials on how to use the extension
in the coming days.

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