Tuesday 23 November 2010

Drupal and SQL Server

One of the more “out of left field” projects I’ve worked on recently involved creating a sample solution that demonstrates how you can integrate Drupal 7 with SQL Server. For those who don’t know, Drupal is an open source content management system that’s widely used on Linux/Apache sites. In recent times, Microsoft has sought to widen the appeal of its Web development platform by adding support for applications and technologies normally used by LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) developers, and a version of Drupal that runs in IIS on Windows and which uses SQL Server as its underlying content database is one outcome of that initiative.

Anyway, Content Master was asked to create two sample Drupal solutions to showcase the advantages of using SQL Server with Drupal – one that integrates Drupal with SQL Server Reporting Services, and another that incorporates location-based content with SQL Server’s spatial data support. I ended up working on this project together with a couple of colleagues named David Miles and James Millar – I designed and implemented the SQL Server reports as well as the spatial data and Bing Maps functionality, and David and James handled the PHP programming and Drupal-specific scripting elements of the solutions.

You can view more details of the Reporting Services solution and the Spatial Data solution on the Content Master blog.

Enjoy!