How a hidden MySQL ‘feature’ triggered a significant security review

James Cundle
4 min readJul 13, 2023
Avoid an easy to make type-conversion mistakes when working with MySQL

Last week my VP of Engineering and I were trying to debug a thorny issue where invalid rows were being returned in a MySQL query set.

Instead of applying the WHERE filter as expected, we were getting hundreds of rows returned that did not appear to meet the filter criteria.

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James Cundle

I’m a CTO, technical co-founder, Y-Combinator alumni, software engineer, musician, record collector, amateur brewer and qualified wine maker rolled in to one.