Installation

Step 1. Install MssqlBundle

Add the realestate/mssql-bundle into composer.json

"require": {
    ....
    "realestateconz/mssql-bundle": "master-dev"
},

And run

$ php composer.phar install

Step 2. Configure DBAL's connection to use MssqlBundle

In config.yml, remove the "driver" param and add "driver_class" instead:

doctrine:
    dbal:
        default_connection:     default
        connections:
            default:
                driver_class:   Realestate\MssqlBundle\Driver\PDODblib\Driver
                host:           %database_host%
                dbname:         %database_prefix%%database_name%
                user:           %database_user%
                password:       %database_password%

Step 3. Enable the bundle

Finally, enable the bundle in the kernel:

<?php
// app/AppKernel.php

public function registerBundles()
{
    $bundles = array(
        // ...
        new Realestate\MssqlBundle\RealestateMssqlBundle(),
    );
}

Notes

Prerequsites

This driver requires version 8.0 (from http://www.ubuntitis.com/?p=64) as default 4.2 version does not have UTF support

In /etc/freetds/freetds.conf, change tds version = 4.2 to tds version = 8.0

NVARCHAR & NTEXT data types

NVARCHAR & NTEXT are not supported. In SQL 2000 SP4 or newer, SQL 2005 or SQL 2008, if you do a query that returns NTEXT type data, you may encounter the following exception: _mssql.MssqlDatabaseError: SQL Server message 4004, severity 16, state 1, line 1: Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier.

It means that SQL Server is unable to send Unicode data to FTREETDS, because of shortcomings of FTREETDS. You have to CAST or CONVERT the data to equivalent NVARCHAR data type, which does not exhibit this behaviour.