title: Alternative needed for PDO connection when using MSSQL via dblib
body: <p>I need to connect to a remote MSSQL server using PHP. I've successfully connected using the dblib, but it has some pretty "nasty" limitations.</p>
  
  <p>I discovered it is unable to fetch column rows that are in the ntext format, there is a simple workaround for this, but it limits the output (converting the ntext to nvarchar via the query), I then noticed it also has problems fetching the rows in decimal format (or so it seems, unfortunately the General error 4004 thrown for everything isn't very helpful).</p>
  
  <p>There is just too much hacking required for my liking, is there a better way to approach this, maybe a different db library I should look into for my connection?</p>
  
  <p>It's worth noting that I've used mssql_* with great success, but it is obviously not an ideal approach and I wish to keep using PDO.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Things worth noting;</p>
  
  <p>I'm running on Debian, and I know Microsoft has released drivers for ODBC, but their driver downloads are bugged and thus don't work (at least not on non-RHEL systems it seems)</p>