Create a test database by copy pasting the below snippet to your shell:

sqlite3 test.db "CREATE TABLE test (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, str text); \
INSERT INTO test (str) VALUES ('test string');"

..and access it from Haskell:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import Control.Applicative
import Database.SQLite.Simple
import Database.SQLite.Simple.FromRow

data TestField = TestField Int String deriving (Show)

instance FromRow TestField where
  fromRow = TestField <$> field <*> field

main :: IO ()
main = do
  conn <- open "test.db"
  execute conn "INSERT INTO test (str) VALUES (?)" (Only ("test string 2" :: String))
  r <- query_ conn "SELECT * from test" :: IO [TestField]
  mapM_ print r
  close conn

SQL-based applications are somewhat notorious for their susceptibility to attacks through the injection of maliciously crafted data. The primary reason for widespread vulnerability to SQL injections is that many applications are sloppy in handling user data when constructing SQL queries.

This library provides a Query type and a parameter substitution facility to address both ease of use and security. A Query is a newtype-wrapped Text. It intentionally exposes a tiny API that is not compatible with the Text API; this makes it difficult to construct queries from fragments of strings. The query and execute functions require queries to be of type Query.

To most easily construct a query, enable GHC's OverloadedStrings language extension and write your query as a normal literal string.

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import Database.SQLite.Simple

hello = do
  conn <- open "test.db"
  query conn "select 2 + 2"

A Query value does not represent the actual query that will be executed, but is a template for constructing the final query.

Since applications need to be able to construct queries with parameters that change, this library uses SQLite's parameter binding query substitution capability.

The Query template accepted by query and execute can contain any number of "?" characters. Both query and execute accept a third argument, typically a tuple. When constructing the real query to execute, these functions replace the first "?" in the template with the first element of the tuple, the second "?" with the second element, and so on. If necessary, each tuple element will be quoted and escaped prior to substitution; this defeats the single most common injection vector for malicious data.

For example, given the following Query template:

select * from user where first_name = ? and age > ?

And a tuple of this form:

("Boris" :: String, 37 :: Int)

The query to be executed will look like this after substitution:

select * from user where first_name = 'Boris' and age > 37

If there is a mismatch between the number of "?" characters in your template and the number of elements in your tuple, a FormatError will be thrown.

Note that the substitution functions do not attempt to parse or validate your query. It's up to you to write syntactically valid SQL, and to ensure that each "?" in your query template is matched with the right tuple element.

This library restricts parameter substitution to work only with "?" characters. SQLite natively supports several other syntaxes for binding query parameters. Unsupported parameters will be rejected and a FormatError will be thrown.

Automated type inference means that you will often be able to avoid supplying explicit type signatures for the elements of a tuple. However, sometimes the compiler will not be able to infer your types. Consider a case where you write a numeric literal in a parameter tuple:

query conn "select ? + ?" (40,2)

The above query will be rejected by the compiler, because it does not know the specific numeric types of the literals 40 and 2. This is easily fixed:

query conn "select ? + ?" (40 :: Double, 2 :: Double)

The same kind of problem can arise with string literals if you have the OverloadedStrings language extension enabled. Again, just use an explicit type signature if this happens.

Haskell lacks a single-element tuple type, so if you have just one value you want substituted into a query, what should you do?

To represent a single value val as a parameter, write a singleton list [val], use Just val, or use Only val.

Here's an example using a singleton list:

execute conn "insert into users (first_name) values (?)"
             ["Nuala"]

The query and query_ functions return a list of values in the FromRow typeclass. This class performs automatic extraction and type conversion of rows from a query result.

Here is a simple example of how to extract results:

import qualified Data.Text as T

xs <- query_ conn "select name,age from users"
forM_ xs $ \(name,age) ->
  putStrLn $ T.unpack name ++ " is " ++ show (age :: Int)

Notice two important details about this code:

• The number of columns we ask for in the query template must exactly match the number of elements we specify in a row of the result tuple. If they do not match, a ResultError exception will be thrown.
• Sometimes, the compiler needs our help in specifying types. It can infer that name must be a Text, due to our use of the unpack function. However, we have to tell it the type of age, as it has no other information to determine the exact type.

The type of a result tuple will look something like this:

(Text, Int, Int)

Although SQL can accommodate NULL as a value for any of these types, Haskell cannot. If your result contains columns that may be NULL, be sure that you use Maybe in those positions of of your tuple.

(Text, Maybe Int, Int)

If query encounters a NULL in a row where the corresponding Haskell type is not Maybe, it will throw a ResultError exception.

Conversion of SQL values to Haskell values is somewhat permissive. Here are the rules.

• For numeric types, any Haskell type that can accurately represent an SQLite INTEGER is considered "compatible".
• If a numeric incompatibility is found, query will throw a ResultError.
• SQLite's TEXT type is always encoded in UTF-8. Thus any text data coming from an SQLite database should always be compatible with Haskell String and Text types.
• SQLite's BLOB type will only be conversible to a Haskell ByteString.

You can extend conversion support to your own types be adding your own FromField / ToField instances.

SQLite's datetime allows for multiple string representations of UTC time. The following formats are supported for reading SQLite times into Haskell UTCTime values:

• YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM
• YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
• YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.SSS
• YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM
• YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS
• YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSS

The above may also be optionally followed by a timezone indicator of the form "[+-]HH:MM" or just "Z".

When Haskell UTCTime values are converted into SQLite values (e.g., parameters for a query), the following format is used:

• YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.SSS

The last ".SSS" subsecond part is dropped if it's zero. No timezone indicator is used when converting from a UTCTime value into an SQLite string. SQLite assumes all datetimes are in UTC time.

The parser and printers are implemented in Database.SQLite.Simple.Time.

Read more about SQLite's time strings in http://sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html