Hi
If you are experiencing troubles with truncated and/or strangely encoded data when using PHP with MS SQL via ODBC try setting odbc.defaultlrl ( in php.ini or via ini_set() ) to a largish number, say 65536, as stated in the other notes here.
The trick is to know how long your data is going to be, so you may want to provide some overhead. Unfortunately you have to know how long your piece of string is before you cut it.
Doing this will allow your app to read up to this amount in one go. I'm sure there is a reason for this behaviour but I hadn't experienced anything like it in 5 years of MySQL and Postgres development.
If you still experience problems AND are using unicode data in the long column of your table, make sure it is set to type "ntext", if it is "text". MSDN has some info on data types for Unicode data.
This caused about 3 days of headaches for me, "binary" data crashing browsers and cyclical result sets (i.e repeating data after odbc.defaultlrl bytes).
This fix was only found by poking things with sticks.
HTH