Book Image

MySQL for Python

By : Albert Lukaszewski
Book Image

MySQL for Python

By: Albert Lukaszewski

Overview of this book

Python is a dynamic programming language, which is completely enterprise ready, owing largely to the variety of support modules that are available to extend its capabilities. In order to build productive and feature-rich Python applications, we need to use MySQL for Python, a module that provides database support to our applications. Although you might be familiar with accessing data in MySQL, here you will learn how to access data through MySQL for Python efficiently and effectively.This book demonstrates how to boost the productivity of your Python applications by integrating them with the MySQL database server, the world's most powerful open source database. It will teach you to access the data on your MySQL database server easily with Python's library for MySQL using a practical, hands-on approach. Leaving theory to the classroom, this book uses real-world code to solve real-world problems with real-world solutions.The book starts by exploring the various means of installing MySQL for Python on different platforms and how to use simple database querying techniques to improve your programs. It then takes you through data insertion, data retrieval, and error-handling techniques to create robust programs. The book also covers automation of both database and user creation, and administration of access controls. As the book progresses, you will learn to use many more advanced features of Python for MySQL that facilitate effective administration of your database through Python. Every chapter is illustrated with a project that you can deploy in your own situation.By the end of this book, you will know several techniques for interfacing your Python applications with MySQL effectively so that powerful database management through Python becomes easy to achieve and easy to maintain.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
MySQL for Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Project: A command-line search utility


This chapter has been about querying MySQL from Python. As a project to finish it out, we will build a command-line search utility. Rather than ask the user for the search term, we will expect the user to state the term as an argument for the command-line invocation.

Note

With a bit more code for this project, we could create a GUI for this program. GUI programming increases the complexity of the code. How much more complex it gets depends on the library being used, but it is nonetheless unnecessary for what we need to illustrate in this project. Until we are certain that we have a database and can connect to it, it is best to keep it simple.

Now, it is true that we could simply take input and feed it through MySQL for Python as a generic SELECT * statement. The logic for this bare bones implementation has been illustrated previously to a great extent. We can create something a bit more sophisticated.

The following characteristics should apply to our search...