Posts Tagged with "sql"

For those who is looking for a good alternative for XAMMP or WAMP web server stacks. There is a very good option called AMPPS!

The listed number of provided features is impressive. Unlike the other solutions Ampps comes with over 300 PHP web applications, over 1000 PHP classes and libraries including Joomla!, WordPress, Magento, Dolphin and more. 

Very easy to install and manage services with the administration panel. You can easily switch PHP versions with only one-click action.

One thing to notice though... Despite the fact that there are several versions of PHP included, you cannot switch MySQL version which, to be honest, I don't find too critical.

Server configuration is also very straightforward using the web panel. If you mess up the configuration, you can reset it to default state which might be useful sometimes. :)

Also it is very easy to update! The app has built-in updater which makes life way easier when it comes to update Ampps.

I am quite sure that most of web developers know what the SQL injection is, and nowdays it seems that even junior developers know basics on how to protect web applications against this type of hacker attack. However, I often see web developers underestimate the level of potential threat. Some web developers think: "We are too small to be interesting for hackers", but they forget that security wholes in their applications can be used to attack other resources, systems and users.

In this post I am not going to show how to attack web applications using an SQL injection, but I'd like to show why SQL injection is dangerous and also how to protect against SQL injection.

Being a web developer, I personally like short solutions, and when I code, I try to write as less code as possible. At the same time the code has to be readable for other developers without using comments.

If you want to combine create/update function into one, MySQL offers you a very useful statement : INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE.

For some programmers (especially for begginers) it might be a bit difficult to understand how do SQL joins work in real life. In fact, sometimes even experienced software developers are not able to explain what is the difference between JOIN, LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN.

Luckily, I found, perhaps, one of the best visual representations of SQL joins I have ever seen which will definately help to understand the mechanism of SQL joins.

See more graphical diagrams and explanations here