Thanks everyone, I end up writing a raw function to query the data I want from database.
public static function dataStreamJSON($stmt, $headers)
{
return Response::stream(function() use ($stmt){
$conn = self::getConnection();
$result = sqlsrv_query($conn, "exec $stmt");
echo '
{
"Customers": {
"Customer": [';
$counter = 0;
while($customer = sqlsrv_fetch_object($result)) {
if($counter !== 0){
echo ",";
}
$counter++;
$row = [
'Firstname' => $customer->Firstname,
'Lastname' => $customer->Lastname,
...
];
echo json_encode($row);
unset($row);
unset($customer);
}
echo ']
}
}';
@sqlsrv_free_stmt($result);
@sqlsrv_close($conn);
}, 200, $headers);
}
The purpose of this code is to stream the data out to JSON format on browser without store the data in any variable, which will caused “out of memory” error.
I managed to stream 700MB of JSON data to the browser without any error. With this code, you will never run into “out of memory” error.
Best way to test this, is to use CURL to access your API and download the data to a JSON file. If you open on browser, it will freeze your screen because browser can't handle large data.