Let's write another Python program to perform various queries against the contents of our database. Start by creating another Python file named query_data.py and place it into the world_borders directory. We start by importing the psycopg2 library, opening up a connection to our database, and creating a database cursor:

import psycopg2
connection = psycopg2.connect(database="world_borders", user="...", password="...")
cursor = connection.cursor()

This should all be familiar from the create_table.py program we created earlier.

Let's now perform a simple (non-spatial) database query, just to see how it works. Add the following to the end of your program:

cursor.execute("SELECT id,name FROM borders ORDER BY name")
for row in cursor:
    print row

When you run your query_data.py program, you should see a list of the record IDs and associated names, taken from your borders table:

(1264, 'Afghanistan')
(1237, 'Albania')
(1235, 'Algeria')
...

Notice that you use cursor.execute...