Well, in this case mysqljs pretty well fucked up the implementation here in that this sort of bug should never happen when using prepared statements, so I'd say it's worse than not having it at all, because it breaks the standard safety guarantees of prepared statements.

This implies that the alternative to using mysqljs is using prepared statements, which is most definitely not the case.

The alternative for people using a library like this is to send plain queries to the db.

That only applies when perfect is not yet achievable. Real parameterized queries exist and can be had today.

> Real parameterized queries exist and can be had today

/s/today/30 years ago: SQL-92 describes them in chapter 4.18 - which at the time was just standardizing something almost all vendors already had in some form or another, for example, I'm pretty sure even the first release of ODBC in the late 1980s also had parameters.

Disclaimer: My pontifications below derive from my life's experiences starting with Access/JET Red as a sprog, to my current professional work with MS SQL Server, Postgres (and MySQL, I'll admit - but I'll say MariaDB instead) built over the past 17 years - but I have absolutely zero experience with Oracle and Db2, so I honestly don't know what cool language features they have (and they must be way ahead of the ISO spec, otherwise why else would people pay so much for it?... Hmm, then again, Oracle still doesn't have a bit/bool column type, does it?).

Anyway:

However, the expressiveness of parameters hasn't changed much since the original design of ODBCS - at least as far as I'm aware: Query parameters are still mere scalar value placeholders instead of hardcoding literals inside queries and statements: with limited exceptions like T-SQL's ceremony-laden table-valued-parameters and Postgre's array types, it's still not possible to parameterize database object identifiers or even have a true variadic `WHERE IN ( ... )` predicate without resorting to Dynamic-SQL, nor can we use parameters to conditionally enable or disable query predicate clauses: yet these are all essential features for any kind of ORM or language-integrated-query system built today (the canonical example being Linq/EF in .NET and TypeORM or Prisma for TypeScript/JS.

Why isn't anyone meaningfully advocating for a "SQL/2"? I know backwards-compatibility is 100% essential, but that's the easy part (because relational calculus and relational are isomorphisms, hence why semantic-preserving query translation between different SQL engines is a solved problem), but lack-of backwards-compatibility is usually the reason most good-ideas die in committee - so how come Google was successful in pushing HTTP/2 and even HTTP/3, but we're still using 1980s-level SMTP and SQL? Are all of the major RDBMS vendors so afraid of change that they're willing to forgoe winning-over millions of new customers if they can ship a usable, flexible, expressive, and safe query (and query-building) language?

I'm just blabbering at this point. Forgive me, but I need something to distract me from the outside world right now.

> /s/today/30 years ago: SQL-92 describes them in chapter 4.18 - which at the time was just standardizing something almost all vendors already had in some form or another, for example, I'm pretty sure even the first release of ODBC in the late 1980s also had parameters.

Interbase must have had them in 1980s since Interbase (and now Firebird) compiles ESQL queries into static BLR code. Since there's no way to compile a new query at runtime (other than by outright switching to using Interbase/Firebird's DSQL C API for a non-compile-time query), all these queries have to be parameterized to be of any use.

I was curious about BLR so I had a quick look but there isn’t much around other than what’s on Firebird’s website.

Their description of BLR makes it sound like an eagerly-evaluated equivalent of SQL Server’s Execution Plans, but are compiled on CREATE instead of on first-use, and are comprised of machine-native (i.e. raw x86/x64 + disk read syscalls) operators arranged together - or maybe slightly higher-level? It’s unclear how schema-binding works.

I’m curious what advantages there are to that approach anymore: databases are invariably IO-bound, not CPU bound, and things like well-maintained indexes and statistics objects are far more important when it comes to DB perf than the ISA of the query engine. I’d wager an ultramodern engine running in WASM or even interpreted Java will run faster on the same hardware than JET, I’d think.

On a related note, why are we still stuck with 4K/8K-sized pages?

You can combine literals into an SQL query, and doing so isn't even hard to do correctly. You'd still use parameters to feed user input, of course.

SQL Server has had _autoparameterization_ opf queries for a while now: when you have multiple queries of the same general shape but with varying literal values, it automatically converts the literals to parameters (rather than vice-versa), and it's generally beneficial for performance because existing query-plans can be reused (instead of having to create a new plan for each literal value encountered): https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2935/sql-server-simpl...

I didn't mean it that way. I mean you can combine SQL fragments, think multiple `ORDER BY` clauses.

And has since June 2004 in MySQL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Milestones

Yeah, but you’re just shifting the location you expect bugs. Using parametrized queries at SQL level doesn’t guarantee you don’t have bugs of this kind at the database layer.

Obviously they’ve been proven for tens of years now, so it’s extremely unlikely, but conceptually it isn’t different.

That’s the kind of thing you say to ship a product to market, to eschew a non-critical feature.

Parametrized Queries for a SQL library are a critical “do not ship without” feature. You do not lie and tell your user you have a safe product causing them to have a compromised system.

I hope to God you are not creating production systems anywhere.

We had a candidate with 'wrote dynamic sql' listed under a job he held previously. They also couldn't answer the question 'how do you prevent a sql injection attack'. He had something like 5 years of experience.

I don't understand how anyone but the greenest of devs doesn't comprehend the importance of these kind of things. But alas, I see it everywhere, including the comment you are responding to.

I had a similar candidate a couple weeks ago. Their CV made a big deal about a dynamic SQL framework they wrote for a previous job, but they just gave me a blank look when I asked how they mitigated SQL injection attacks.

I ask about SQL injection pretty regularly, and it's scary how many devs don't seem to even know what it is.

> I ask about SQL injection pretty regularly, and it's scary how many devs don't seem to even know what it is.

That's either a good thing: because they grew-up with database libraries designed to encourage, if not force, the use of parameterized queries, so it was never a problem for them.

...or it's a bad thing, because they grew-up in the early-days of PHP 4x, learning from PHP/MySQL tutorials written by people who'd today be considered utterly unqualified to speak at length about programming: the kinds of things that only happen when the blind were leading the blindfolded: nightmares like actively encouraging concatenating $_GET values directly into mysql_query() strings because it means having less variables, and less variables means better performance (right?!) - and they never learned otherwise.

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I have a pet theory that people who got started with PHP in the 2000s who are still working today are so burned from their earlier experiences that they're now the most detail-oriented and best-practices-following programmers around, regardless of the language they use today - while the people who never experienced hardship (to the extent that having to use PHP is a hardship...) become complacent, and our ever-increasing reliance on unvetted external dependencies (in all language ecosystems, imo) is going to end badly.

Or not. No idea, honestly!

> I hope to God you are not creating production systems anywhere.

Good luck building production systems without compromises.

Also, I think everyone would appreciate it if you didn’t hurl personal insults about. This aint Reddit.

Imagine working on a flight controlller that has functions that produce the wrong values for flight control! "it's ok, something is better than nothing" is not true!