Using MySQL Stored Programs with Python

Python is an open source, object-oriented, cross-platform language commonly used for system administration, application development, and many other purposes. Python is often used in very similar types of applications as Perl. However, Python devotees believe that Python offers many advantages over Perl in that it is natively object oriented, results in more readable and maintainable code, and enables greater programmer productivity, especially for large-scale developments. (Perl devotees have a different opinion, of course!)

The Python language includes a specification for a vendor-independent database-access API, the Python Database API Specification v2.0. You can find the specification for this API at http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0249.html. The MySQL implementation of this API is called MySQLdb , and is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python.

In this chapter we will review how to interact with a MySQL database using Python and the MySQLdb module, and explain how to exploit MySQL stored programs through this interface.