Archives
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Microsoft Announces SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux!
In this morning’s keynote address at the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Summit 2011, Quentin Clark (Corporate Vice President at Microsoft) announced that a preview of the Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux will soon be widely available to customers. Yes, you read that right. Microsoft plans to release a driver that provides 1st class access to SQL Server from Linux/Unix operating systems. Recently, Microsoft has been working closely with a handful of partners to get feedback on private releases of the driver. A publicly available preview release of the driver is planned for later this fall.
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Why is PHP 5.3 on Windows faster than previous PHP versions?
Last week I had the good fortune of hearing Rasmus Lerdorf speak at the Seattle PHP Meetup. His talks was excellent – it was sprinkled with history, personal stories, tips, best practices, and insights into what he’s thinking about for the future. At one point, during a section on best practices, he urged everyone to move to PHP 5.3 if they hadn’t already. He added (and I’m paraphrasing here), “If you aren’t running PHP 5.3 on Windows, you’re lucky…because you have a 40% performance boost coming.” He clarified this by saying that, with some help from Microsoft, improvements were made in PHP 5.3 that led to a 40% performance improvement of PHP on Windows. Because he didn’t go into the details of why this performance boost was realized, I got questions in email the next day asking about why. So, here’s a slide from a presentation I did last year that explains why: