Running stored procedures on MSSQL via any language on Linux
If you need to run store procedures on Microsoft SQL Server on perl, php, ruby, etc., you need to configure /etc/freetds/freetds.conf with the server connection information. Specifically, specify the tds version to be 8.0. Something like the following.
/etc/freetds/freetds.conf
[Server80]
host = domain.com
port = 1433
tds version = 8.0
Connection to the server via php would look like this.
$link = mssql_connect("Server80", "user", "pass");
Scaling down from MS to open source
We just moved a service that was running on the Microsoft stack (Windows Server 2008, .NET, MSSql Server, IIS) to an open source stack (Ubuntu Server, php, Codeigniter framework, apache2, postgres).
We now run the service on a cloud server with dual cpu and 256MB ram (Yes, that's megabytes).
The old server ran on dual core with 2GB of ram.
How to do that Mysql thing in MSSql?
Ever wonder how to translate something you normally do between Mysql and MSSql?
Here is a good list of parity between the two.
Also, one section left open by that article is date formatting. After reading that, you can see why it was left out. It is quite a topic on its own.
Date Formats in MSSql