Connecting to Actian X (Ingres) With PHP and NGINX

Not long ago I spoke at the Actian Hybrid Data Conference in London about connecting Actian X (Ingres), Actian’s combination of industry-leading transactional and high-speed analytic databases, to the Web. Here we present how to use a very popular web server (reverse proxy, load balancing, etc.) on Linux, NGINX, to do just that. Here’s how you can set up NGINX for the Ingres ODBC driver and a generic PHP ODBC connector on CentOS. Adapting these steps to other Linux distributions, like Ubuntu or SUSE should not be too difficult.

Setting Up PHP With NGINX

Instructions on setting up NGINX can be found online in multiple places. One good set of instructions is How To Install the LEMP stack On CentOS 7. You would only need NGINX and PHP (no need for MySQL – obviously you would use Actian X) and additionally, you would have to have Ingres or Actian X installed. Once PHP and NGINX are completely set up, you can proceed to the next step.

Setting Up Ingres ODBC With PHP

A generic ODBC package is required for the Ingres ODBC driver to work with PHP. One popular choice is the php-odbc extension. It doesn’t come out of the box with the php package but is usually available on all major Linux distributions as an add-on and it can be easily installed. On CentOS you would run

yum install php-odbc

Note: The PHP version may differ and because of that the name of the packages may differ. For example php may be the name of package for PHP 5.4, but if you want PHP 7.0, then you would install php70w. The name of the additional packages would differ in the same way (e. g. php-odbc vs. php70w-odbc).

Another common ODBC PHP extension is  PHP Data Objects (PDO).

NGINX Configuration

Those of you who are familiar with Apache would note that setting up NGINX is a little more complex given that there are two pieces that are interconnected to run PHP for the web. The NGINX engine is one, but a PHP process manager is also required. This is why there are two sets of settings, one for the NGINX server, the other for php-fpm (PHP process manager). For the Ingres ODBC driver only php-fpm needs to be configured.

As discussed, this example is for CentOS, but it works similarly for other distributions, though the location of the configuration file may be different. To find out what that is, I suggest checking the instructions for setting up php-fpm for the desired distribution.

Edit the php-fpm configuration file (/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf). Add the II_SYSTEM directory value and the value of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to this file as environment parameters as shown in the example below.

env[II_SYSTEM] = /opt/Actian/IngresII
   env[LD_LIBRARY_PATH] = /lib:/usr/lib:/opt/Actian/IngresII/ingres/lib:/opt/Actian/IngresII/ingres/lib/lp32
   env[ODBCSYSINI] = /opt/Actian/IngresII/files

A restart of the php-fpm service would be required after making these configuration changes.

Other Resources

Detailed instructions on setting up PHP with the Ingres ODBC driver along with examples are available at Actian Knowledge Base – Ingres ODBC with PHP.

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