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 movie database


The project for this chapter involves querying the Sakila database from MySQL.

Note

Sakila is a database of fictitious movies and films.

For this project, we will write a program with the following features:

  • Accepts user input for the name of either a film or an actor

  • Returns the first record for confirmation by the user

  • If the first set of data is confirmed as being what the user wants, the entire set is returned

  • All errors are fatal and result in error messages being passed to the user

  • All warnings are explicitly silenced

Getting Sakila

The Sakila sample database represents the possible tables for a DVD rental store. It is available for download from the MySQL website:

http://downloads.mysql.com/docs/sakila-db.zip

Once you have downloaded the file, unpack it into a temporary directory. Then you are ready to create the database.

Creating the Sakila database

To create the Sakila database, one follows similar steps to what we did for the world database. Where the world database...