Microsoft ODBC driver was working well in Centos7. Rhel9 repository has lots of conflicts with Alma9 and I can’t install the driver from there. Microsoft driver is a must, no other ODBC driver has all the same functionality when connecting to MS SQL Server.
see: Install the Microsoft ODBC driver for SQL Server (Linux) - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn
Replace the ‘8’ with 9.0. Follow the remaining instructions.
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/9.0/prod.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/mssql-release.repo
Problem: cannot install both libdav1d-1.0.0-2.el9.x86_64 and libdav1d-0.9.2-1.el9.x86_64
got rid of them after update, and indeed Microsoft rhel9.0 repo is working fine, and so is sqlsrv_connect() from PHP. Great!