MySQL with Python

In this tutorial you will learn how to use a widely used database management system called MySQL in Python.  You do not need any previous knowledge of MySQL to use this tutorial, but there is a lot more to MySQL than covered in this short introductory tutorial.

Related course
SQL Tutorial: Learn SQL with MySQL Database -Beginner2Expert

MySQL tutorial
Data is stored in a collection of tables with each table consisting of a set of rows and columns. This is similar to how data is stored in SQLite.   To interact with the data stored in tables we use a special-purpose programming language called SQL.

Step 1: Install MySQL
First you must install a MySQL driver, use the specific installation method below.

On Windows:
Install MySQLdb using the installer.

On Linux:
Install MySQLdb using:

sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb yum install mysql-python

depending on your version.

On Mac:
Follow the installation instructions from stackoverflow

MySQL server has to be running before going to the next step.

Step 2: Setup the database

Make sure you have database access, from the command line type:

mysql -u USERNAME -p

MySQL will then ask your password.  Type these commands:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE pythonspot; mysql> USE pythonspot;

We go on the create the table:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS examples ( id int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, description varchar(45), PRIMARY KEY (id) );

Then we can insert data into the table (these are SQL queries):

INSERT INTO examples(description) VALUES ("Hello World"); INSERT INTO examples(description) VALUES ("MySQL Example"); INSERT INTO examples(description) VALUES ("Flask Example");

You can now grab all records from the table using a SQL query:

mysql> SELECT * FROM examples; +----+---------------+ | id | description | +----+---------------+ | 1 | Hello World | | 2 | MySQL Example | | 3 | Flask Example | +----+---------------+ 3 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Step 3: Getting the data from Python
You can access the database directly from Python using the MySQLdb module.

#!/usr/bin/python import MySQLdb   db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", # your host user="root", # username passwd="root", # password db="pythonspot") # name of the database   # Create a Cursor object to execute queries. cur = db.cursor()   # Select data from table using SQL query. cur.execute("SELECT * FROM examples")   # print the first and second columns for row in cur.fetchall() : print row[0], " ", row[1]

Output:

1 Hello World 2 MySQL Example 3 Flask Example