http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html
This links to xampp works great on macs. I have put it only for PPC machines, but it claims to work properly on Intel as well.
I also had success installing FreeTDS and PHP from source on an Intel Macbook, running Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). My steps were the following:
PREPARE SOURCE CODE
step 1: download latest php version
step 2: un-tar the php source code
step 3: download latest freetds version
step 4: un-tar the freetds source code
INSTALL THE FREETDS
step 5: make sure there is a writable directory at /usr/local/freetds
step 6: "cd" to the freetds source directory
step 7: run "sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/freetds --enable-msdblib"
step 8: run "sudo make"
step 9: run "sudo make install"
step 10: run "touch /usr/local/freetds/include/tds.h" (add blank, but necessary files)
step 11: run "touch /usr/local/freetds/lib/libtds.a" (add blank, but necessary files)
INSTALL THE PHP
step 11: "cd" to the php source directory
step 12: run "sudo ./configure --disable-all --with-mssql=/usr/local/freetds"
step 13: run "sudo make"
step 14: run "sudo make install"
Of course, since I was disabling-all (step 12) that means that you have to explicitly add back those modules you want to configure php with.
If anybody is looking for the api documentation now - (26 May 2010), it can be found at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc296152%28SQL.90%29.aspx
A new version of "Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP" (originally named "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP") has been released that supports SQL Server 2008:
http://sql2k5php.codeplex.com
The driver leverages the ODBC driver included in the "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client" thus this PHP lib will only run on Windows.
You can download the ODBC driver from Microsoft's website for free as well at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=228DE03F-3B5A-428A-923F-58A033D316E1&displaylang=en#SNAC
Microsoft have provided a PHP driver for SQL Server 2005.
At the time of this note, the link to it is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc296221.aspx
If that doesn't work, search MSDN for "SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP"
I was having a difficult time getting four Windows 2003 Servers to connect to an MSSQL database with PHP 5.2.5 and IIS after already getting one such server to connect with no problems. I even copied the entire php directory and dlls to the other servers exactly as they were on the working server but continually got "Unable to connect to server" errors. The fix was to delete the ntwdblib.dll from the PHP directory. It was already in the C:\windows\system32 directory and this did not cause a problem on the first server but did on all the others.
The 30-character limitation does not apply to the FreeTDS db-lib implementation. FreeTDS returns column names of any length supported by the server (and protocol).