Is it better to use a prepared Select statement when you are only doing one select?

Question

I am currently writing a CRUD class in PHP using PDO.

I like the security that prepared statements provide, but I have heard that they also prevent databases like mysql from using the queryCache.

Is it better to use a prepared Select statement when you are only doing one select at a time? or would just $pdo->quote() suffice the security standpoint (or have any other advantages like caching?).

All my update, delete and inserts are done using prepared statements already. I am just curious about the selects.

Answer 1

MySQLPerformanceBlog.com did some benchmarks in an article about "Prepared Statements." Peter Zaitsev wrote:

I’ve done a simple benchmark (using SysBench) to see performance of simple query (single row point select) using standard statement, prepared statement and have it served from query cache. Prepared statements give 2290 queries/sec which is significantly better than 2000 with standard statements but it is still well below 4470 queries/sec when results are served from query cache.

This seems to say that the "overhead" of using prepared statements is that they are 14.5% faster than using a straight query execution, at least in this simple test. The relative difference probably diminishes with a more complex query or a larger result set.

It seems counter-intuitive that prepared queries would be faster, given the double round-trip to the server and other factors. Peter's benchmark lacks details. Anyway, you should run your own tests, because the type of query you run, and your environment and hardware, are definitely important factors.

As for Query Cache, it was true in the past that prepared statements were incompatible with caching query results, but this was changed. See "How the Query Cache Operates" in the MySQL documentation:

Before MySQL 5.1.17, prepared statements do not use the query cache. Beginning with 5.1.17, prepared statements use the query cache under certain conditions, which differ depending on the preparation method: ...

The documentation goes on to describe these conditions. Go read it.

I do recommend using prepared statements for SELECT queries. Quoting variables as you interpolate them into SQL statements can be effective if you do it consistently. But even quoting may have some subtle security vulnerabilities, e.g. with multi-byte character sets (see MySQL bug #8378). It's easier to use prepared queries in a secure way in these cases.