General question regarding DBMS

Hello everyone,

while reading through the security guidelines, provided by OWASP, regarding SQL Injection Prevention, I came across "Escaping all User Supplied Input" (link). I don't have much knowledge regarding the general DBMS concepts so I couldn't understand its meaning. What does "escaping user input" actually mean in programming language or in DBMS

? A plain Google search gave results on how to do the "escaping" but not the definition of what it actually is.

So, please provide me the definition or any external link for this.

I'd suggest trying Wikipedia first. It should be enough to introduce you into the problem.

I'd only like to emphasize you should always use bind variables to prevent SQL injection, that makes you 100% protected from this type of attacks. It is not very clear from that article. Don't concentrate on escaping very much, you really shouldn't ever need it. Only if you cannot use binds for some really serious and unavoidable reason (and I doubt it is ever the case), you'd need to do the escaping. It is actually very hard to get it 100% bulletproof.