MySQL’s allowMultiQueries flag with JDBC and jOOQ

MySQL’s JDBC connector has a security feature called allowMultiQueries, which defaults to false. When turned off, it prevents using a useful, but potentially dangerous feature in MySQL via JDBC:

try (Statement s = connection.createStatement()) {
    try {
        s.execute("create table t (i int);");

        // This doesn't work, by default:
        s.executeUpdate("""
            insert into t values (1);
            insert into t values (2);
        """);
    }
    finally {
        s.execute("drop table t");
    }
}

By default, the above produces a syntax error:

Exception in thread "main" java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'insert into t values (2)' at line 2
	at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.exceptions.SQLError.createSQLException(SQLError.java:120)
	at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.exceptions.SQLExceptionsMapping.translateException(SQLExceptionsMapping.java:122)
	at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.StatementImpl.executeUpdateInternal(StatementImpl.java:1333)
	at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.StatementImpl.executeLargeUpdate(StatementImpl.java:2106)
	at com.mysql.cj.jdbc.StatementImpl.executeUpdate(StatementImpl.java:1243)
	at org.jooq.testscripts.JDBC.main(JDBC.java:34)

We can’t chain statements like that, unless we turn on allowMultiQueries=true in the JDBC connection URL:

jdbc:mysql://localhost/test?allowMultiQueries=true

And now, suddenly, the statement batch completes normally, and two records are inserted into the table.

Why this feature?

The security feature helps prevent some SQL injection vulnerabilities. It is now much harder to append additional statements in case you have the bad idea of concatenating values to your string, such as:

// Terrible idea:
s.executeUpdate("insert into t values (" + value + ")");

Because, what if value contained the string "1); drop table t;"? It would be syntactically correct, so it would execute “as expected.” That wouldn’t be very nice.

Don’t get a false sense of security now. Turning off this capability will not prevent all SQL injection vulnerabilities. Just make this particular one harder. There are still various ways this particular lack of using a bind variable can lead to an attacker reading your data, e.g. through a time-based attack.

The risk of SQL injection needs to be taken seriously. The best thing is to always write static SQL with bind variables (e.g. PreparedStatement, stored procedures, or jOOQ), or a SQL builder like jOOQ for dynamic SQL.

Using allowMultiQueries in jOOQ

When using jOOQ, the above situation is very unlikely to happen. The default usage of jOOQ is using:

• The code generator to generate database meta data
• The DSL to generate SQL

Only in rare cases would you use plain SQL templating to work around a specific lack of functionality in jOOQ, and in that case, the templating language will help you avoid concatenating strings and running into SQL injection vulnerabilities.

If you’re of the careful sort, you can add an annotation processor to your build that prevents using the plain SQL API in jOOQ (any usage won’t compile by default, unless you explicitly opt in).

So, the MySQL flag isn’t really useful for your jOOQ usage. In fact, it’s even a problem, because jOOQ internally relies on generating statement batches as the above. Here are some features that don’t work correctly when you turn off allowMultiQueries=false (most of these also apply to MariaDB, btw):

GROUP_CONCAT

Whenever you use GROUP_CONCAT in jOOQ on MySQL, jOOQ assumes you haven’t already changed MySQL’s default value for @@group_concat_max_length. The default value is extremely low, namely 1024. And not only does that value prevent the string aggregation of larger data sets, it just fails silently, which produces wrong values!

When emulating JSON_ARRAYAGG() in MySQL using GROUP_CONCAT, there’s usually a detectable syntax error in the resulting JSON array, but this isn’t the case when you just want to produce some string values, e.g. a comma separated list. (See this previous blog why we don’t use the native JSON_ARRAYAGG() support yet).

So, what jOOQ does every time you use GROUP_CONCAT explicitly (or jOOQ uses it internally for some emulation), jOOQ will prepend and append the following statements:

-- These are prepended
SET @t = @@group_concat_max_len;
SET @@group_concat_max_len = 4294967295;

-- Actual statement here:
SELECT group_concat(A SEPARATOR ',') FROM T;

-- These are appended
SET @@group_concat_max_len = @t;

If you already fixed the system or session variable yourself, you can turn off this feature by changing the Settings.renderGroupConcatMaxLenSessionVariable flag.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION

Many SQL dialects have a CREATE OR REPLACE syntax for stored procedures, functions, triggers, and other stored objects that do not contain data. It’s very useful syntax sugar for writing this, instead:

-- Much simpler
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION f ...

-- Than this
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS f;
CREATE FUNCTION f ...

But again, if you turn off allowMultiQueries=false, then this emulation in jOOQ won’t work and you get a syntax error again. There’s nothing jOOQ can do here for you. You’d have to manually run the two statements, instead of using the convenience syntax.

FOR UPDATE WAIT n

Many dialects have a FOR UPDATE WAIT n syntax that allows for specifying a WAIT timeout for pessimistic locks, e.g.

SELECT *
FROM t
FOR UPDATE WAIT n;

MySQL 8.0.26 doesn’t support this feature yet, but since jOOQ 3.15 and #11543, we’re emulating the above syntax using this:

SET @t = @@innodb_lock_wait_timeout;
SET @@innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 2;
SELECT *
FROM t
FOR UPDATE;
SET @@innodb_lock_wait_timeout = @t;

Another thing that wouldn’t work if you had allowMultiQueries=false

Anonymous blocks

Many procedural languages support anonymous blocks of procedural code, i.e. procedural code that is not stored in a procedure. It makes perfect sense. After all, we don’t have to store all of our SQL in views either, so why do we have to store our PL/SQL, T-SQL, PL/pgSQL, etc. in a stored procedure? This can be very useful especially when you want to generate these blocks dynamically, using jOOQ to run some logic on the server rather than the client, reducing round trips.

In Oracle, you can write:

BEGIN
  INSERT INTO t VALUES (1);

  IF TRUE THEN
    INSERT INTO t VALUES (2);
  END IF;
END;

jOOQ has started supporting such anonymous blocks since 3.12. Look at the manual page about the IF statement. You can write:

// Assuming the usual static imports:
import static org.jooq.impl.DSL.*;
import static org.jooq.impl.SQLDataType;

// Then write:
Variable<Integer> i = var("i", INTEGER);

ctx.begin(
  declare(i).set(1),

  if_(i.eq(0)).then(
    insertInto(A).columns(A.COL).values(1)
  ).elsif(i.eq(1)).then(
    insertInto(B).columns(B.COL).values(2)
  ).else_(
    insertInto(C).columns(C.COL).values(3)
  )
).execute();

This translates to and executes the correct procedural anonymous blocks in those dialects that support them, but MySQL 8.0.26 unfortunately doesn’t, yet, so what do we do? We generate an “anonymous” procedure, call it, and drop it again:

CREATE PROCEDURE block_1629705082441_2328258() 
BEGIN
DECLARE i INT; 
  SET i = 1; 

  IF i = 0 THEN
    INSERT INTO a (col) VALUES (1);
  ELSEIF i = 1 THEN
    INSERT INTO b (col) VALUES (2);
  ELSE
    INSERT INTO c (col) VALUES (3);
  END IF; 
END; 
CALL block_1629705082441_2328258(); 
DROP PROCEDURE block_1629705082441_2328258;

I mean, why not. But again, this relies on allowMultiQueries=true, otherwise, the JDBC driver will reject this statement.

For more info about the procedural language API in jOOQ, please refer to: https://blog.jooq.org/vendor-agnostic-dynamic-procedural-logic-with-jooq/

Conclusion

MySQL’s JDBC driver has a nice security feature that is intended to prevent some cases of SQL injection, especially when users use the JDBC connection for manual SQL execution. There’s always that one poor soul on the team that doens’t know about SQL injection yet, and thus gets it wrong, opening pandora’s box. For those usages, allowMultiQueries=false is a reasonable default.

When using jOOQ as jOOQ was intended to be used, SQL injection is much less likely. This excludes plain SQL templating usages, in case of which this article doesn’t apply, though. On the other hand, jOOQ internally relies on allowMultiQueries=true to enable a few emulations that require multiple statements to be executed in a single round trip.

A future jOOQ version will allow for configuring the execution model for multi queries, such that the above can be executed as multiple round trips. See #9645 for more details.

Until then, if you want to get the most out of jOOQ with MySQL, be sure to turn on allowMultiQueries=true on your jOOQ connection, possibly keeping it turned off elsewhere.