CakePHP and MSSQL

It should be possible to have CakePHP directly talking to a Microsoft SQL server, but I don't know how and didn't try it. The advantage of talking directly to MSSQL is that you can use the standard Models.

In our situation we didn't have the ability to let Cake directly connect to Microsoft SQL server and we needed some other solution. Our frontend and backend are on different locations so we needed to be creative. In this situation we chose to use SQLXML on our Microsoft SQL server and directly send our queries to SQLXML. The results are parsed by a Vendor we wrote and are stored in an array. I can't give you the exact code, but just have a look at Microsofts SQLXML for IIS and try to execute some queries via a URL.