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

Accessing user metadata


If you write a program that interacts with MySQL dynamically, it will need to adopt its behavior based on the server setup and the characteristic of a user's account. You will then need to be able to access what privileges have been granted to a user from within a MySQL session; you obviously cannot count on having administrator access. For this reason, MySQL provides access to user information from within a session.

SHOW GRANTS

In using SHOW GRANTS, we ask MySQL to return the GRANT statements used to grant privileges to the user. The results will show the precise tables for which permission has been granted. However, any passwords that were part of the original GRANT statement are returned as a hash.

As a user mammamia, we can see the GRANT statements that pertain to that account as shown below:

mysql> SHOW GRANTS;
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Grants for mammamia@localhost|
...