Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

The Database Connection

The entry point into DB-API is really the only part of the API tied to a particular database engine. By convention, all modules supporting DB-API are named after the database they support with a db extension. The MySQL implementation is thus called MySQLdb. Similarly, the Oracle implementation is called oracledb and the Sybase implementation sybasedb. Each module contains a connect( ) method that returns a DB-API connection object. This method returns an object that has the same name as the module:

import MySQLdb;
conn = MySQLdb.connect(host='carthage', user='test',  
                       passwd='test', db='test');

This example connects using the username/password pair test/test to the MySQL database test hosted on the machine carthage. In addition to these four arguments, you can specify a custom port, the location of a Unix socket to use for the connection, and an integer representing client connection flags. All arguments must be passed to connect( ) as keyword/value pairs, as in the example above.

The API for a connection object is very simple. You basically use it to gain access to cursor objects and manage transactions. When you are done, you should close the connection:

conn.close(  );