How to "handle" database queries in code?

What programming language and (if any) database library are you using?

I'm using C++ and SQLite's C implementation.

I guess I'm just unused to all this.

There's a few different pieces to this question.

The first is the handling of queries itself. C++ does not have the best interfaces for such things and SQLite's C API is also a bit lacking. You want to make sure you're very careful to use the placeholder syntax and never ever construct a raw SQL query using user input, though; that's the surest way to get a SQL injection security hole!

The second bit is how you're handling the request and response. This is not an easy topic and C++ by itself does not provide a great answer here. The short version is that your approach is "correct." The long version is that you should use a framework/library that makes getting all the fiddly details correct since C++ doesn't.

I highly recommend you look at things like NodeJS, Python's Tornado, or other event-driven IO-oriented application server frameworks to at least see the structure of how they deal with request-response scenarios like this; you want to emulate that kind of structure. The upcoming version of C++ should offer a lot more language and library utilities to make this kind of application much easier to develop, reason about, and debug, but for now you'll have to rely on a third-party library (or roll your own).

That's pretty much what you need to do. In the enterprisey world, they are called DAO (Data Access Object) and ORM (Object Relational Mapping)