Not much activity on PDO, does this mean "it just works" and we ship it?

Time and time again we have been told that Microsoft needs to provide a good PDO driver as this is the future direction for PHP. Given how many different feature requests were filed and comments posted (not just on this forum, on our Connect site, blog, survey, etc.), the download and forum activity statistics for the version 2.0 CTP are significantly lower than our previous CTPs and Final releases.

“How much lower?” one may ask. Currently it is at about 25% of the peak we had for our previous v1.1 CTP that we released in May 2009.

Couple that with the fact that we have only a handful of support posts on our MSDN forum, again much lower than for our v1.1 CTP, and that Drupal 7 has successfully adopted it for their SQL Server / SQL Azure support, it is indeed quite surprising.

Does this mean that people just didn’t need it and we shouldn’t have done it?
Or does it mean that it is so broken that we need to start from scratch and do it over?
Or does it mean that it meets your needs and, except for the few issues reported, we should consider shipping it very soon?

Well, it is kind of too late for the first, and the forum activity doesn’t quite support the second. Which leaves us with the third scenario, and not quite what we expected.

The Drupal, Doctrine and Zend folks did and sent us some feedback. Our PDO driver is available on our download center as well as a referenceable component in the Web Platform Installer.

So, I urge you all to download it and try it out.

Let us know what you think, all feedback welcome. We look forward to it!

Happy PDO coding!

Ashay Chaudhary
Program Manager, SQL Server Driver for PHP