When Should You Skip Using Prepared Statements in PHP?

Why Not Use Prepared Statements?

When evaluating the use of prepared statements for a PHP web application, it's important to consider whether their benefits outweigh the potential performance implications. While prepared statements are generally recommended for improved security and performance, there are certain situations where they may not be necessary.

Factors to Consider:

• Simple Statements: If the SQL statements being executed are simple and executed only once, the overhead of using prepared statements may not be justified.
• Limited Database Interaction: If each page hit only executes a single database statement and there is no significant database load, using prepared statements may not provide noticeable benefits.
• Use of Emulated Prepared Statements: PDO offers an option to use emulated prepared statements, which can provide the same security benefits as real prepared statements without introducing additional database round-trips.

Recommendation:

In the scenario described, where the statements are simple, executed only once, and the database load is limited, it may be more appropriate to avoid prepared statements. This approach minimizes the number of database round-trips and avoids any unnecessary overhead.

Additional Considerations:

• Parameterization and Injection Defense: If parameterization and injection defense are still desired, emulated prepared statements can be used as an alternative to real prepared statements.
• Performance Comparison: There is typically a negligible performance difference between prepared statements and non-prepared queries when executing simple statements.
• Benchmarking: While stress testing may not be feasible in a hosted environment, it's still recommended to perform some light benchmarking with different statement execution methods to determine the impact on performance.

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