@guybrush,
Please take a look at this gallery page for an example on rendering PHP Chart with data from database.
If you are still facing issue, kindly create sample project reproducing the issue you are facing and share it with us over Google-Drive or Onedrive along with sample database so that we can run it locally at our end to understand the scenario better and help you out.
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Manoj Mohan
Team CanvasJS