Posts tagged SQL

Table size in PostgreSQL

Disk space seems endless, until you run out and/or have to pay the bill. The question is how to find tables with a high disk storage usage and with the query below it shows the table and index size, but also the size of TOAST data for PostgreSQL.

After running this query on the development schema and exporting the results to CSV, we can see that a ManyToMany table consumes a total of 39 MB. With over 330.000 entries this seems numbers seem to be fine as the table size is in line with the amount of data stored in it.

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Renaming database in PostgreSQL

Sometimes you have a system with legacy naming standards, but you really want to switch over to the new standard to keep all the scripting clean without some exceptions no one is going to remember in 12 months. Oracle had the command ALTER DATABASE, but since Oracle 10 you need to take the database offline and do some magic. MySQL got the RENAME DATABASE option with release 5.1.7 and lost the option again with release 5.1.23 as it was eating data.

Luckily PostgreSQL still has the command ALTER DATABASE so let’s rename a database and the owner. Before we start we need the password and then we need to log in as the PostgreSQL superuser postgres or another account with similar privileges. So first we check the database name and owner.

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Starting to stop SQL injections, part 2

In a previous posting, I gave an example of how to make database queries safer by using parameter binding and basically stopping SQL injections. The next step is to make the code more readable and maintainable. This doesn’t sound like a priority for secure software development, but readable code is also code that can be verified and maintained by other people. It gives you the edge to debug problems quickly and invites others to supply patches. So let’s take the example where the previous posting ended.

For one or two parameters this may work, but when queries become bigger you need to start counting, and counting beyond three is a bad idea in most cases. Let’s change the question mark with a named variable called ‘:username’ in this example. One could then use the function bindParam() to specify which named variable needs to be replaced and has additional features, but in this example, we use the standard binding during in execute phase.

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Starting to stop SQL injections

In a lot of examples about PHP, strings are concatenated before a database query is executed as below. Some examples advise to use PHP-functions mysql_real_escape_string() and/or addslashes() to make database query safe against SQL-injections. But this isn’t really a solution as when using addslashes() also requires the use of stripslashes() after retrieving data from a database. Some sites show the lack of proper implementation and show the famous ' string on a website.

Like in Perl with DBI, also PHP has PDO that allows for variables to be parameterized while executing a query as in the example below. This removes the need for homemade solutions that don’t cover all use-cases and allows for a way to provide a stable and more secure interface for your applications when communicating with databases.

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