Natively Connect to IBM Cloud Object Storage Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for IBM Cloud Object Storage into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build IBM Cloud Object Storage-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to IBM Cloud Object Storage data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Register a New Instance of Cloud Object Storage

If you do not already have Cloud Object Storage in your IBM Cloud account, follow the procedure below to install an instance of SQL Query in your account:

1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the

Connecting using OAuth Authentication

There are certain connection properties you need to set before you can connect. You can obtain these as follows:

API Key

To connect with IBM Cloud Object Storage, you need an API Key. You can obtain this as follows:

1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the Platform API Keys page.
3. On the middle-right corner click "Create an IBM Cloud API Key" to create a new API Key.
4. In the pop-up window, specify the API Key name and click "Create". Note the API Key as you can never access it again from the dashboard.

Cloud Object Storage CRN

If you have multiple accounts, specify the CloudObjectStorageCRN explicitly. To find the appropriate value, you can:

• Query the Services view. This will list your IBM Cloud Object Storage instances along with the CRN for each.
• Locate the CRN directly in IBM Cloud. To do so, navigate to your IBM Cloud Dashboard. In the Resource List, Under Storage, select your Cloud Object Storage resource to get its CRN.

Connecting to Data

You can now set the following to connect to data:

• InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
• ApiKey: Set this to your API key which was noted during setup.
• CloudObjectStorageCRN (Optional): Set this to the cloud object storage CRN you want to work with. While the connector attempts to retrieve this automatically, specifying this explicitly is recommended if you have more than Cloud Object Storage account.

When you connect, the connector completes the OAuth process.

1. Extracts the access token and authenticates requests.
2. Saves OAuth values in OAuthSettingsLocation to be persisted across connections.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to IBM Cloud Object Storage by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC IBMCloudObjectStorage Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC IBMCloudObjectStorage Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Objects WHERE Bucket = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC IBMCloudObjectStorage Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Objects WHERE Bucket = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('someBucket'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC IBMCloudObjectStorage Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Key, Etag FROM Objects WHERE Bucket = 'someBucket'");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC IBM Cloud Object Storage data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Key, Etag FROM Objects WHERE Bucket = 'someBucket'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Key"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC IBM Cloud Object Storage data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Objects WHERE Bucket = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('someBucket'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are IBM Cloud Object Storage-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.