Microsoft has released ODBC drivers for the 64 bit version of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5 and Enterprise Linux 6. These drivers support the C and C++ programming languages and can be used to connection to SQL Server 2008, 2008 RS, and 2012. Unfortunately there are a lot of limitations for this release. The following are specifically listed as not being supported at this time:
- SQL Azure
- 32-bit operations systems
- PHP on Linux
- Other UNIX variants such as SUSE, Solaris, and HP-UX
These are not mentioned and presumed to be unsupported:
- SQL Server 2005 and earlier
- Other Linux variants such as Debian and Ubuntu
Boris Kolpackov did manage to get a preview edition of the drivers working on other Linux operating systems. While there are no guarantees, you can try his instructions for installing the preview edition on the Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions.
The requirements for these drivers are very specific. Of particular note is the UnixODBC Driver Manager, which has to user version 2.3.0. According to the documentation, neither earlier nor later versions of this driver manager are compatible with the SQL Server ODBC drivers.
Unlike the PHP on Windows drivers, the SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux is not being released under an open source license. Documentation is available on MSDN.