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: Building a database class


When you are new to a project or just unfamiliar with a database, getting up to speed on the oral tradition of your team and (all too frequently) sparse documentation can be quite frustrating. In such instances, being able to access the technical information for a database can be quite helpful. The project for this chapter is therefore to build a database class that gives you easy access to metainformation for a database of your choosing.

As we have seen, MySQL results are not always easy to read in the aggregate. Therefore, we will also need code that will digest the results and output them in human-friendly format. The specification points for this project are thus:

  • Develop a class to access MySQL metadata

  • Return metainformation on a specified database using the class instance

  • Reformat tabular information to be more friendly to human readers

  • Print out a report of the information

We will save the boiler-plate code of creating the connection and checking the...