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

As a db driver, there is also oursql. Some of the reasons listed on that link, which say why oursql is better:

• oursql has real parameterization, sending the SQL and data to MySQL completely separately.
• oursql allows text or binary data to be streamed into the database and streamed out of the database, instead of requiring everything to be buffered in the client.
• oursql can both insert rows lazily and fetch rows lazily.
• oursql has unicode support on by default.
• oursql supports python 2.4 through 2.7 without any deprecation warnings on 2.6+ (see PEP 218) and without completely failing on 2.7 (see PEP 328).
• oursql runs natively on python 3.x.

So how to connect to mysql with oursql?

Very similar to mysqldb:

import oursql

db_connection = oursql.connect(host='127.0.0.1',user='foo',passwd='foobar',db='db_name')
cur=db_connection.cursor()
cur.execute("SELECT * FROM `tbl_name`")
for row in cur.fetchall():
    print row[0]

The tutorial in the documentation is pretty decent.

And of course for ORM SQLAlchemy is a good choice, as already mentioned in the other answers.