Antipattern: Making Bricks Without Straw

Developers commonly practice the See No Evil antipattern in two forms: first, ignoring the return values of a database API, and second, reading fragments of SQL code interspersed with application code. In both cases, developers fail to use information that is readily available to them.

Diagnoses without diagnostics

Let’s take a look at the code below:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO("mysql:dbname=test;host=db.example.com",
"dbuser", "dbpassword");
$sql = "SELECT bug_id, summary, date_reported FROM Bugs
WHERE assigned_to = ? AND status = ?";  //1
$stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql);            //2
$stmt->execute(array(1, "OPEN"));       //3
$bug = $stmt->fetch();                  //4
?>