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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T14:15:27+00:00

Joomla is an open-source CMS written in PHP, that originally was based on Apache,

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Joomla is an open-source CMS written in PHP, that originally was based on Apache, MySQL, and Linux.

Now it runs on IIS + Windows.

Can I install it on my Windows machine, using MS SQL Server instead of MySQL?

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I have seen a video showing a person doing this. But when I download the joomla installer, it’s not possible to install it onto MS SQL.

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  1. Editorial Team

    edited after having spent some time with joonla+SQL Server.

    Yes, you can run joomla on SQL Server, sort of. But there are some big caveats.

    • You must download a modified joomla installation. The best I found was a modified v1.6 joomlaposted by Sudhi from Hooduku. The direct link is here. It’s a one-off.

    • There’s no current (v1.7) version of joomla supporting SQL Server that I found.

    • As far as I could tell there’s no commitment to an ongoing maintenance of this thing. I looked in the joomla release plan and did not see SQL Server support as a commitment.

    • Lastly, and possibly most importantly, it does not work.

    How does it not work? Let me count the ways.

    There are queries scattered throughout the joomla source code, to retrieve things like module names, article content, ratings, and so on. Most of the SQL code works with MySQL, and not with SQL Server. The “multidb” modified version modifies most? many of those queries to allow things to work with SQL Server. But, many of those things were missed. For example: I found a query, cannot recall now, which used LENGTH to get the length of a string, instead of the SQL Server function LEN. This caused the query to break, and whatever I was trying to do, did not happen.

    Another case (once again, I forget precisely when this occurred) had to do with inserting a row. The joomla code uses syntax like INSERT INTO table column1=4 column2=18. Actually now that I type this I recall precisely the table – it was the #__modules_menu table. The correct SQL Server syntax to insert a row is INSERT INTO table (column1, column2) VALUES(4, 128) . A simple enough change, but you need to skulk through joomla’s PHP code to figure out where to make it.

    There were other myriad bugs that popped up, mostly having to do with malformed SQL syntax. Treating a column as a number, when it is actually a string. Using the wrong table alias for an ORDER BY clause.

    I found that uploading a new template sort of worked – the template was unpacked and recognized, no error reported. But the template styles table didn’t get an update, for whatever reason, so the template was not actually available in the admin panels, after the upload. If I manually inserted an entry into #__template_styles, then the template became available.

    The name on the label of the special joomla download I used said “RC1” but it is not release quality, by any stretch of the imagination.

    If you try this, you will also need a bunch of other pre-requisites.

    • PHP of course. I used v5.3.6
    • the MS SQL Server drivers for PHP — I grabbed the driver build for single-thread use, with the VC9 runtime. This needed to match my version of php. See below. I had to drop in php_sqlsrv_53_nts_vc9.dll and php_pdo_sqlsrv_53_nts_vc9.dll into the ext/ directory for PHP.
    • SQL Server or SQL Server Express (the free version). You may need to apply service packs.

    The PHPinfo page shows VC runtime version and thread safety params
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