What are the potential pitfalls of using the "*" expression in a MySQL query in PHP?

Using the "*" expression in a MySQL query can lead to potential security risks such as SQL injection attacks and performance issues due to fetching unnecessary data. To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to explicitly specify the columns you want to retrieve in the query instead of using "*". 

// Specify the columns you want to retrieve instead of using "*"
$query = "SELECT column1, column2 FROM table_name WHERE condition = 'value'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Loop through the results
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    // Process the data
}

Keywords

MySQL query PHP wildcard performance

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