Natively Connect to SQL Analysis Services Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for SQL Analysis Services into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build SQL Analysis Services-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to SQL Analysis Services 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.

To connect, provide authentication and set the Url property to a valid SQL Server Analysis Services endpoint. You can connect to SQL Server Analysis Services instances hosted over HTTP with XMLA access. See the Microsoft documentation to configure HTTP access to SQL Server Analysis Services.

To secure connections and authenticate, set the corresponding connection properties, below. The data provider supports the major authentication schemes, including HTTP and Windows, as well as SSL/TLS.

• HTTP Authentication

  Set AuthScheme to "Basic" or "Digest" and set User and Password. Specify other authentication values in CustomHeaders.

• Windows (NTLM)

  Set the Windows User and Password and set AuthScheme to "NTLM".

• Kerberos and Kerberos Delegation

  To authenticate with Kerberos, set AuthScheme to NEGOTIATE. To use Kerberos delegation, set AuthScheme to KERBEROSDELEGATION. If needed, provide the User, Password, and KerberosSPN. By default, the data provider attempts to communicate with the SPN at the specified Url.

• SSL/TLS:

  By default, the data provider attempts to negotiate SSL/TLS by checking the server's certificate against the system's trusted certificate store. To specify another certificate, see the SSLServerCert property for the available formats.

You can then access any cube as a relational table: When you connect the data provider retrieves SSAS metadata and dynamically updates the table schemas. Instead of retrieving metadata every connection, you can set the CacheLocation property to automatically cache to a simple file-based store.

See the Getting Started section of the CData documentation, under Retrieving Analysis Services Data, to execute SQL-92 queries to the cubes.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to SQL Analysis Services by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SSAS 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.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC SSAS Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($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 Adventure_Works WHERE Fiscal_Year = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SSAS Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Adventure_Works WHERE Fiscal_Year = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('FY 2008'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SSAS Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Fiscal_Year, Sales_Amount FROM Adventure_Works");
 

Process Results

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SQL Analysis Services data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Fiscal_Year, Sales_Amount FROM Adventure_Works");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Fiscal_Year"] . "\n";
}

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

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC SQL Analysis Services data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Adventure_Works WHERE Fiscal_Year = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('FY 2008'));
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 SQL Analysis Services-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.