How do I connect to a MySQL Database in Python?

Question

How do I connect to a MySQL database using a python program?

Answer 1

If you do not need MySQLdb, but would accept any library, I would very, very much recommend MySQL Connector/Python from MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/python/.

It is one package (around 110k), pure Python, so it is system independent, and dead simple to install. You just download, double-click, confirm license agreement and go. There is no need for Xcode, MacPorts, compiling, restarting …

Then you connect like:

import mysql.connector    
cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user='scott', password='tiger',
                              host='127.0.0.1',
                              database='employees')

try:
   cursor = cnx.cursor()
   cursor.execute("""
      select 3 from your_table
   """)
   result = cursor.fetchall()
   print result
finally:
    cnx.close()