My sqlite3 database/queries are very slow. Switch or fix queries? - sqlite

I have a large sqlite db. Its 185mb.
This query is taking about 5seconds and it returns 2 rows. I added an index to user.name than Content.user_id. It stills take many seconds. Can sqlite handle large files like this? Is there a simple fix for a private app like telling sqlite to put everything in ram on app startup? (Its C#.NET for dev use only).
select Content.*,name from user
join Content on Content.user_id=user.id
where user.name like 'some_name' order by some_col ASC;

Try the following:
Replace LIKE 'some_name' with = 'some_name'. LIKE queries with underscore or percent sign will not perform as well as equality checks. Depending on the position of the first percentage sign or underscore they might be unable to use your index on user.name.
Launch ANALYZE.
Followup to your answer:
I think you have case-insensitive LIKE pragma enabled. This means that:
You should recreate your database and use name COLLATE NOCASE in the definition of the name column of table users. Thus, all comparison tests on user names will be case insensitive, and so will your index be. This way, a case-insensitive LIKE can use the index also.

Perhaps you should check your indexes

Related

Error with SQLite query, What am I missing?

I've been attempting to increase my knowledge and trying out some challenges. I've been going at this for a solid two weeks now finished most of the challenge but this one part remains. The error is shown below, what am i not understanding?
Error in sqlite query: update users set last_browser= 'mozilla' + select sql from sqlite_master'', last_time= '13-04-2019' where id = '14'
edited for clarity:
I'm trying a CTF challenge and I'm completely new to this kind of thing so I'm learning as I go. There is a login page with test credentials we can use for obtaining many of the flags. I have obtained most of the flags and this is the last one that remains.
After I login on the webapp with the provided test credentials, the following messages appear: this link
The question for the flag is "What value is hidden in the database table secret?"
So from the previous image, I have attempted to use sql injection to obtain value. This is done by using burp suite and attempting to inject through the user-agent.
I have gone through trying to use many variants of the injection attempt shown above. Im struggling to find out where I am going wrong, especially since the second single-quote is added automatically in the query. I've gone through the sqlite documentation and examples of sql injection, but I cannot sem to understand what I am doing wrong or how to get that to work.
A subquery such as select sql from sqlite_master should be enclosed in brackets.
So you'd want
update user set last_browser= 'mozilla' + (select sql from sqlite_master''), last_time= '13-04-2019' where id = '14';
Although I don't think that will achieve what you want, which isn't clear. A simple test results in :-
You may want a concatenation of the strings, so instead of + use ||. e.g.
update user set last_browser= 'mozilla' || (select sql from sqlite_master''), last_time= '13-04-2019' where id = '14';
In which case you'd get something like :-
Thanks for everyone's input, I've worked this out.
The sql query was set up like this:
update users set last_browser= '$user-agent', last_time= '$current_date' where id = '$id_of_user'
edited user-agent with burp suite to be:
Mozilla', last_browser=(select sql from sqlite_master where type='table' limit 0,1), last_time='13-04-2019
Iterated with that found all tables and columns and flags. Rather time consuming but could not find a way to optimise.

Do not fail on missing column in a SQLLite query

I have a simple query like this:
SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS WHERE CUSTID LIKE '~' AND BANKNO LIKE '~'
The problem is, the customers-table might or might not contain the BANKNO column depending on circumstances I've no control over. If however BANKNO is not a column in CUSTOMERS, this query fails.
So my question is: it is possible to test if the BANKNO column exists and if so, to include it in the query and if not to exclude this column?
The query really has to be flexible.
A non-existent column in a SELECT to sqlite3 will always fail.
One option might be to put the "full" sql in a try block, and if it errors, execute the other sql.
Or, you could query PRAGMA table_info('CUSTOMERS') and interrogate the result to see if a column in question is in the database. Find the sqlite doc here https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info.
I'm sure there are other options, but the bottom line is you need to know before the sql is executed that it contains only valid column names.

How to use dynamic values while executing SQL scripts in R

My R workflow now involves dealing with a lot of queries (RPostgreSQL library). I really want to make code easy to maintain and manage in the future.
I started loading large queries from separate .SQL files (this helped) and it worked great.
Then I started using interpolated values (that helped) which means that I can write
SELECT * FROM table WHERE value = ?my_value;
and (after loading it into R) interpolate it using sqlInterpolate(ANSI(), query, value = "stackoverflow").
What happens now is I want to use something like this
SELECT count(*) FROM ?my_table;
but how can I make it work? sqlInterpolate() only interpolates safely by default. Is there a workaround?
Thanks
In ?DBI::SQL, you can read:
By default, any user supplied input to a query should be escaped using
either dbQuoteIdentifier() or dbQuoteString() depending on whether it
refers to a table or variable name, or is a literal string.
Also, on this page:
You may also need dbQuoteIdentifier() if you are creating tables or
relying on user input to choose which column to filter on.
So you can use:
sqlInterpolate(ANSI(),
"SELECT count(*) FROM ?my_table",
my_table = dbQuoteIdentifier(ANSI(), "table_name"))
# <SQL> SELECT count(*) FROM "table_name"
sqlInterpolate() is for substituting values only, not other components like table names. You could use other templating frameworks such as brew or whisker.

CustTableListPage filtering is too slow

When I'm trying to filter CustAccount field on CustTableListPage it's taking too long to filter. On the other fields there is no latency. I'm trying to filter just part of account number like "*123".
I have done reindexing for custtable and also updated statics but not appreciable difference at all.
When i have added listpage's query in a view it's filtering custAccount field normally like the other fields.
Any suggestion?
Edit:
Our version is AX 2012 r2 cu8, not a user based problem it occurs for every user, Interaction class has some custimizations but just for setting some buttons enable/disable props. etc... i tryed to look query execution what i found is not clear. something like FETCH_API_CURSOR_000000..x
Record a trace of this execution and locate what is a bottleneck.
Keep in mind that that wildcards (such as *) have to be used with care. Using a filter string that starts with a wildcard kills all performance because the SQL indexes cannot be used.
Using a wildcard at the end
Imagine that you have a dictionnary and have to list all the words starting with 'Foo'. You can skip all entries before 'F', then all those before 'Fo', then all those before 'Foo' and start your result list from there.
Similarly, asking the underlying SQL engine to list all CustAccount entries starting with '123' (= filter string '123*') allows using an index on CustAccount to quickly skip to the relevant data.
Using a wildcard at the start
Imagine that you still have that dictionnary and have to list all the words ending with 'ing'. You would have no other choice than going through the entire dictionnary and checking the ending of every word (due to the alphabetical sorting).
This explains why asking the SQL engine to list all CustAccount entries ending with '123' (= filter string '*123') means that all CustAccount values must be investigated. So the AOS loops through all the entries and uses an SQL cursor to do this. That is the FETCH_API_CURSOR statement you see on the SQL level.
Possible solutions
Educate your end user that using a wildcard at the beginning of a filter string will always be slow on a large table.
Step up the SQL server hardware / allocated resources (faster CPU, more RAM, faster disk, ...).
Create a full text index on CustAccount (not a fan of this one and performance impact should be thoroughly investigated).
I've solve the problem. CustTableListPage query had a sorting over DirPartyTable.Name field. When I remove this sorting, filtering with wildcard working like a charm.

SQLite "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO" not working

I have to write a query in sqlite to update the record if it exists or insert it if the record do not already exists. I have looked the syntax of INSERT OR REPLACE INTO from here. But in my case, when I execute the query below many times the record is duplicated. i.e If I execute the query 5 times the record is inserted 5 times.
INSERT OR REPLACE INTO NICKS
(id_nick,name_nick,date_creation)
VALUES
('nabeelarif', 'Muhammad Nabeel','2012-03-04')
Have you any idea what I am doing wrong. I am working on android platform and using 'Firefox Sqlite Manager' to test my query.
You need to have a unique index on one or a combination of those columns.
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX idx_something ON NICKS (id_nick, name_nick, date_creation);
In Android, you should use SQLiteDatabase.replace(), which does insert or update. With the Android SQLite implementation, you normally don't use raw queries represented as strings. See http://developer.android.com/reference/android/database/sqlite/SQLiteDatabase.html#replace%28java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String,%20android.content.ContentValues%29
Do you have a primary key or unique index defined for your table? I believe the attributes that make up the primary key or a unique index are used to determine if a row already exists or not.

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