In this new post to his KillerPHP.com blog Stefan Mischook looks at a few of the basic steps you can take to help prevent SQL injection attacks in your application.

You should protect your relational databases (like MySQL) from the dreaded SQL injection attack. These attacks are conducted by evil sniveling nerds, trying to insert damaging SQL code into your HTML form fields (and query strings too) to do things like drop database tables or even wipe out your database altogether!

There's three things he recommends as good places to start - mysql_real_escape_string, using an ORM layer with its own escaping and using something like PDO that cleans up the input for you.