Memory Utilisation of Docker-Based Databases Under SQL Injection: A Comparative Case Study

Docker is widely used to deploy applications in containerised environments. This study investigates whether the physical memory utilisation of databases deployed in Docker differs from that of equivalent non-Docker deployments during a Structured Query Language injection (SQLi) attack. A quantitative approach was adopted, using Glances to collect system data, JASP 0.18 for descriptive statistics and paired-samples t tests, and StatKey to examine mean differences. Two application stacks were evaluated: DVWA (PHP/MariaDB) and Acunetix (MySQL). Within the conditions examined in this study, the Docker-based deployments did not demonstrate improved memory performance when compared with the non-Docker deployments during SQLi. Instead, the results suggest that the Docker-based configurations were associated with higher memory use.