Just want to say that after much headache I was finally able to get this to work. Our group is deciding to stick with Drupal 7 on MS SQL because of reasons (maturity, familiarity, etc.). Yesterday I got completely stonewalled following these steps and got a FastCGI 500 service error every time. Much troubleshooting led to nothing, but today I restarted from scratch and got it all working.
The trick for me, was that even though my Windows 7 is 64-bit I have to install x86 versions of EVERYTHING. I also had to go with PHP 5.6. Winchache for 5.6 DOES exist but is x86 only. And your PHP has to match x86 or else it will not be able to recognize that extension.
Other issues:
- The Wincache backend settings are wrong. There is no /contrib/ level by default.
- The newest Drupal core is able to install properly and does not require the patch mentioned for Drupal Core.
- Drupal for me ran as IUSR. Not sure if that's typical, but needed to have permissions for this across the Drupal Site.
- Also make sure you make a new Drupal WEB SITE in IIS. Not simply an application off of the Default Web Site.
- When you rename the Drupal settings file you need to leave around the default.settings file as-is or Drupal will issue a warning/error.
- Make sure for the pdo_sqlsrv extension you pick the version that matches your PHP (5.6 for me), is NTS, and has pdo in the name. Rename it to php_pdo_sqlsrv.dll
- You have to increase the pdo sql serv buffer max size or Drupal will give an error message. Add this line to php.ini:
pdo_sqlsrv.client_buffer_max_kb_size=24480
- PHP Tools seems to only be a 30 day trial, not sure what the best long-term free alternative is.
TL;DR: Just follow the instructions, but sometimes things till won't work because some dated info/typos.
Just want to say that after much headache I was finally able to get this to work. Our group is deciding to stick with Drupal 7 on MS SQL because of reasons (maturity, familiarity, etc.). Yesterday I got completely stonewalled following these steps and got a FastCGI 500 service error every time. Much troubleshooting led to nothing, but today I restarted from scratch and got it all working.
The trick for me, was that even though my Windows 7 is 64-bit I have to install x86 versions of EVERYTHING. I also had to go with PHP 5.6. Winchache for 5.6 DOES exist but is x86 only. And your PHP has to match x86 or else it will not be able to recognize that extension.
Other issues:
- The Wincache backend settings are wrong. There is no /contrib/ level by default.
- The newest Drupal core is able to install properly and does not require the patch mentioned for Drupal Core.
- Drupal for me ran as IUSR. Not sure if that's typical, but needed to have permissions for this across the Drupal Site.
- Also make sure you make a new Drupal WEB SITE in IIS. Not simply an application off of the Default Web Site.
- When you rename the Drupal settings file you need to leave around the default.settings file as-is or Drupal will issue a warning/error.
- Make sure for the pdo_sqlsrv extension you pick the version that matches your PHP (5.6 for me), is NTS, and has pdo in the name. Rename it to php_pdo_sqlsrv.dll
- You have to increase the pdo sql serv buffer max size or Drupal will give an error message. Add this line to php.ini:
pdo_sqlsrv.client_buffer_max_kb_size=24480
- PHP Tools seems to only be a 30 day trial, not sure what the best long-term free alternative is.
TL;DR: Just follow the instructions, but sometimes things till won't work because some dated info/typos.