path: root/doc/user_guide.rst

====================
MySQLdb User's Guide
====================

.. contents::
..

Introduction
------------

MySQLdb is an thread-compatible interface to the popular MySQL
database server that provides the Python database API.

Installation
------------

The ``README`` file has complete installation instructions.


_mysql
------

If you want to write applications which are portable across databases,
use MySQLdb_, and avoid using this module directly. ``_mysql``
provides an interface which mostly implements the MySQL C API. For
more information, see the `MySQL documentation`_. The documentation
for this module is intentionally weak because you probably should use
the higher-level MySQLdb module. If you really need it, use the
standard MySQL docs and transliterate as necessary.

.. _`MySQL documentation`: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/


MySQL C API translation
.......................

The MySQL C API has been wrapped in an object-oriented way. The only
MySQL data structures which are implemented are the ``MYSQL``
(database connection handle) and ``MYSQL_RES`` (result handle)
types. In general, any function which takes ``MYSQL *mysql`` as an
argument is now a method of the connection object, and any function
which takes ``MYSQL_RES *result`` as an argument is a method of the
result object. Functions requiring none of the MySQL data structures
are implemented as functions in the module. Functions requiring one of
the other MySQL data structures are generally not implemented.
Deprecated functions are not implemented. In all cases, the ``mysql_``
prefix is dropped from the name. Most of the ``conn`` methods listed
are also available as MySQLdb Connection object methods. Their use is
non-portable.

MySQL C API function mapping
............................

=================================== ==================================
      C API                         ``_mysql``
=================================== ==================================
 ``mysql_affected_rows()``          ``conn.affected_rows()``
 ``mysql_autocommit()``		    ``conn.autocommit()`` 
 ``mysql_character_set_name()``	    ``conn.character_set_name()``
 ``mysql_close()``                  ``conn.close()`` 
 ``mysql_commit()``		    ``conn.commit()``
 ``mysql_connect()``		    ``_mysql.connect()`` 
 ``mysql_data_seek()``		    ``result.data_seek()`` 
 ``mysql_debug()``		    ``_mysql.debug()`` 
 ``mysql_dump_debug_info``	    ``conn.dump_debug_info()`` 
 ``mysql_escape_string()``	    ``_mysql.escape_string()`` 
 ``mysql_fetch_row()``		    ``result.fetch_row()`` 
 ``mysql_get_character_set_info()`` ``conn.get_character_set_info()``
 ``mysql_get_client_info()``	    ``_mysql.get_client_info()``
 ``mysql_get_host_info()``	    ``conn.get_host_info()`` 
 ``mysql_get_proto_info()``	    ``conn.get_proto_info()`` 
 ``mysql_get_server_info()``	    ``conn.get_server_info()`` 
 ``mysql_info()``		    ``conn.info()`` 
 ``mysql_insert_id()``		    ``conn.insert_id()`` 
 ``mysql_num_fields()``		    ``result.num_fields()`` 
 ``mysql_num_rows()``		    ``result.num_rows()`` 
 ``mysql_options()``		    various options to ``_mysql.connect()`` 
 ``mysql_ping()``		    ``conn.ping()`` 
 ``mysql_query()``		    ``conn.query()`` 
 ``mysql_real_connect()``	    ``_mysql.connect()`` 
 ``mysql_real_query()``		    ``conn.query()`` 
 ``mysql_real_escape_string()``	    ``conn.escape_string()`` 
 ``mysql_rollback()``		    ``conn.rollback()``
 ``mysql_row_seek()``		    ``result.row_seek()`` 
 ``mysql_row_tell()``		    ``result.row_tell()`` 
 ``mysql_select_db()``		    ``conn.select_db()`` 
 ``mysql_set_character_set()``	    ``conn.set_character_set()``
 ``mysql_ssl_set()``                ``ssl`` option to ``_mysql.connect()``
 ``mysql_stat()``		    ``conn.stat()`` 
 ``mysql_store_result()``	    ``conn.store_result()`` 
 ``mysql_thread_id()``		    ``conn.thread_id()`` 
 ``mysql_thread_safe_client()``	    ``conn.thread_safe_client()`` 
 ``mysql_use_result()``		    ``conn.use_result()``
 ``mysql_warning_count()``          ``conn.warning_count()`` 
 ``CLIENT_*``			    ``MySQLdb.constants.CLIENT.*`` 
 ``CR_*``			    ``MySQLdb.constants.CR.*`` 
 ``ER_*``			    ``MySQLdb.constants.ER.*`` 
 ``FIELD_TYPE_*``		    ``MySQLdb.constants.FIELD_TYPE.*`` 
 ``FLAG_*``			    ``MySQLdb.constants.FLAG.*`` 
=================================== ==================================


Some _mysql examples
....................

Okay, so you want to use ``_mysql`` anyway. Here are some examples.

The simplest possible database connection is::

    import _mysql
    db=_mysql.connect()

This creates a connection to the MySQL server running on the local
machine using the standard UNIX socket (or named pipe on Windows),
your login name (from the USER environment variable), no password, and
does not ``USE`` a database.  Chances are you need to supply more
information.::

    db=_mysql.connect("localhost","joebob","moonpie","thangs")

This creates a connection to the MySQL server running on the local
machine via a UNIX socket (or named pipe), the user name "joebob", the
password "moonpie", and selects the initial database "thangs".

We haven't even begun to touch upon all the parameters ``connect()``
can take.  For this reason, I prefer to use keyword parameters::

    db=_mysql.connect(host="localhost",user="joebob",
	              passwd="moonpie",db="thangs")

This does exactly what the last example did, but is arguably easier to
read. But since the default host is "localhost", and if your login
name really was "joebob", you could shorten it to this::

    db=_mysql.connect(passwd="moonpie",db="thangs")

UNIX sockets and named pipes don't work over a network, so if you
specify a host other than localhost, TCP will be used, and you can
specify an odd port if you need to (the default port is 3306)::

    db=_mysql.connect(host="outhouse",port=3307,passwd="moonpie",db="thangs")

If you really had to, you could connect to the local host with TCP by
specifying the full host name, or 127.0.0.1.

Generally speaking, putting passwords in your code is not such a good
idea::

    db=_mysql.connect(host="outhouse",db="thangs",read_default_file="~/.my.cnf")

This does what the previous example does, but gets the username and
password and other parameters from ~/.my.cnf (UNIX-like systems). Read
about `option files`_ for more details.

.. _`option files`: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Option_files.html

So now you have an open connection as ``db`` and want to do a
query. Well, there are no cursors in MySQL, and no parameter
substitution, so you have to pass a complete query string to
``db.query()``::

    db.query("""SELECT spam, eggs, sausage FROM breakfast
             WHERE price < 5""")

There's no return value from this, but exceptions can be raised. The
exceptions are defined in a separate module, ``_mysql_exceptions``,
but ``_mysql`` exports them. Read DB API specification PEP-249_ to
find out what they are, or you can use the catch-all ``MySQLError``.

.. _PEP-249: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0249.html

At this point your query has been executed and you need to get the
results. You have two options::

    r=db.store_result()
    # ...or...
    r=db.use_result()

Both methods return a result object. What's the difference?
``store_result()`` returns the entire result set to the client
immediately. If your result set is really large, this could be a
problem. One way around this is to add a ``LIMIT`` clause to your
query, to limit the number of rows returned. The other is to use
``use_result()``, which keeps the result set in the server and sends
it row-by-row when you fetch. This does, however, tie up server
resources, and it ties up the connection: You cannot do any more
queries until you have fetched **all** the rows. Generally I
recommend using ``store_result()`` unless your result set is really
huge and you can't use ``LIMIT`` for some reason.

Now, for actually getting real results::

    >>> r.fetch_row()
    (('3','2','0'),)

This might look a little odd. The first thing you should know is,
``fetch_row()`` takes some additional parameters. The first one is,
how many rows (``maxrows``) should be returned. By default, it returns
one row. It may return fewer rows than you asked for, but never
more. If you set ``maxrows=0``, it returns all rows of the result
set. If you ever get an empty tuple back, you ran out of rows.

The second parameter (``how``) tells it how the row should be
represented. By default, it is zero which means, return as a tuple.
``how=1`` means, return it as a dictionary, where the keys are the
column names, or ``table.column`` if there are two columns with the
same name (say, from a join). ``how=2`` means the same as ``how=1``
except that the keys are *always* ``table.column``; this is for
compatibility with the old ``Mysqldb`` module.

OK, so why did we get a 1-tuple with a tuple inside? Because we
implicitly asked for one row, since we didn't specify ``maxrows``.

The other oddity is: Assuming these are numeric columns, why are they
returned as strings? Because MySQL returns all data as strings and
expects you to convert it yourself. This would be a real pain in the
ass, but in fact, ``_mysql`` can do this for you. (And ``MySQLdb``
does do this for you.) To have automatic type conversion done, you
need to create a type converter dictionary, and pass this to
``connect()`` as the ``conv`` keyword parameter.

The keys of ``conv`` should be MySQL column types, which in the
C API are ``FIELD_TYPE_*``. You can get these values like this::

    from MySQLdb.constants import FIELD_TYPE

By default, any column type that can't be found in ``conv`` is
returned as a string, which works for a lot of stuff. For our
purposes, we probably want this::

    my_conv = { FIELD_TYPE.LONG: int }

This means, if it's a ``FIELD_TYPE_LONG``, call the builtin ``int()``
function on it.  Note that ``FIELD_TYPE_LONG`` is an ``INTEGER``
column, which corresponds to a C ``long``, which is also the type used
for a normal Python integer. But beware: If it's really an ``UNSIGNED
INTEGER`` column, this could cause overflows. For this reason,
``MySQLdb`` actually uses ``long()`` to do the conversion. But we'll
ignore this potential problem for now.

Then if you use ``db=_mysql.connect(conv=my_conv...)``, the
results will come back ``((3, 2, 0),)``, which is what you would
expect.

MySQLdb
-------

MySQLdb is a thin Python wrapper around ``_mysql`` which makes it
compatible with the Python DB API interface (version 2).  In reality,
a fair amount of the code which implements the API is in ``_mysql``
for the sake of efficiency.

The DB API specification PEP-249_ should be your primary guide for
using this module. Only deviations from the spec and other
database-dependent things will be documented here.

Functions and attributes
........................

Only a few top-level functions and attributes are defined within
MySQLdb.

connect(parameters...)  
	 Constructor for creating a connection to the
	 database. Returns a Connection Object. Parameters are the
	 same as for the MySQL C API.  In addition, there are a few
	 additional keywords that correspond to what you would pass
	 ``mysql_options()`` before connecting. Note that some
	 parameters must be specified as keyword arguments! The
	 default value for each parameter is NULL or zero, as
	 appropriate. Consult the MySQL documentation for more
	 details. The important parameters are:

         host
            name of host to connect to. Default: use the local host 
            via a UNIX socket (where applicable)

         user
            user to authenticate as. Default: current effective user.

         passwd
            password to authenticate with. Default: no password.

         db
            database to use. Default: no default database.

	 port
	    TCP port of MySQL server. Default: standard port (3306).

         unix_socket
	    location of UNIX socket. Default: use default location or
            TCP for remote hosts.

         conv
            type conversion dictionary.  Default: a copy of
            ``MySQLdb.converters.conversions``

         compress
            Enable protocol compression. Default: no compression.

         connect_timeout
            Abort if connect is not completed within
            given number of seconds. Default: no timeout (?)

         named_pipe
            Use a named pipe (Windows). Default: don't.

         init_command
            Initial command to issue to server upon
            connection. Default: Nothing.

         read_default_file
            MySQL configuration file to read; see
            the MySQL documentation for ``mysql_options()``.

         read_default_group
            Default group to read; see the MySQL
            documentation for ``mysql_options()``.

         cursorclass
            cursor class that ``cursor()`` uses, unless
            overridden. Default: ``MySQLdb.cursors.Cursor``.  *This
            must be a keyword parameter.*

         use_unicode
            If True, CHAR and VARCHAR and TEXT columns are returned as
            Unicode strings, using the configured character set. It is
            best to set the default encoding in the server
            configuration, or client configuration (read with
            read_default_file).  If you change the character set after
            connecting (MySQL-4.1 and later), you'll need to put the
            correct character set name in connection.charset.

	    If False, text-like columns are returned as normal strings,
	    but you can always write Unicode strings.

	    *This must be a keyword parameter.*

	 charset
	    If present, the connection character set will be changed
	    to this character set, if they are not equal. Support for
	    changing the character set requires MySQL-4.1 and later
	    server; if the server is too old, UnsupportedError will be
	    raised. This option implies use_unicode=True, but you can
	    override this with use_unicode=False, though you probably
	    shouldn't.

	    If not present, the default character set is used.

	    *This must be a keyword parameter.*

	 sql_mode
	    If present, the session SQL mode will be set to the given
	    string. For more information on sql_mode, see the MySQL
	    documentation. Only available for 4.1 and newer servers.

	    If not present, the session SQL mode will be unchanged.

	    *This must be a keyword parameter.*

	 ssl
	    This parameter takes a dictionary or mapping, where the
	    keys are parameter names used by the mysql_ssl_set_ MySQL
	    C API call. If this is set, it initiates an SSL connection
	    to the server; if there is no SSL support in the client,
	    an exception is raised. *This must be a keyword
	    parameter.*

.. _mysql_ssl_set: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mysql_ssl_set.html


apilevel 
      String constant stating the supported DB API level. '2.0'

threadsafety
      Integer constant stating the level of thread safety the
      interface supports. This is set to 1, which means: Threads may
      share the module.

      The MySQL protocol can not handle multiple threads using the
      same connection at once. Some earlier versions of MySQLdb
      utilized locking to achieve a threadsafety of 2. While this is
      not terribly hard to accomplish using the standard Cursor class
      (which uses ``mysql_store_result()``), it is complicated by
      SSCursor (which uses ``mysql_use_result()``; with the latter you
      must ensure all the rows have been read before another query can
      be executed.  It is further complicated by the addition of
      transactions, since transactions start when a cursor execute a
      query, but end when ``COMMIT`` or ``ROLLBACK`` is executed by
      the Connection object.  Two threads simply cannot share a
      connection while a transaction is in progress, in addition to
      not being able to share it during query execution. This
      excessively complicated the code to the point where it just
      isn't worth it.

      The general upshot of this is: Don't share connections between
      threads. It's really not worth your effort or mine, and in the
      end, will probably hurt performance, since the MySQL server runs
      a separate thread for each connection.  You can certainly do
      things like cache connections in a pool, and give those
      connections to one thread at a time. If you let two threads use
      a connection simultaneously, the MySQL client library will
      probably upchuck and die.  You have been warned.

      For threaded applications, try using a connection pool.
      This can be done using the `Pool module`_.

      .. _`Pool module`: http://dustman.net/andy/python/Pool

charset
      The character set used by the connection. In MySQL-4.1 and newer,
      it is possible (but not recommended) to change the connection's
      character set with an SQL statement. If you do this, you'll also
      need to change this attribute. Otherwise, you'll get encoding
      errors.

paramstyle
      String constant stating the type of parameter marker formatting
      expected by the interface. Set to 'format' = ANSI C printf
      format codes, e.g. '...WHERE name=%s'. If a mapping object is
      used for conn.execute(), then the interface actually uses
      'pyformat' = Python extended format codes, e.g. '...WHERE
      name=%(name)s'. However, the API does not presently allow the
      specification of more than one style in paramstyle.

      Note that any literal percent signs in the query string passed
      to execute() must be escaped, i.e. %%.

      Parameter placeholders can **only** be used to insert column
      values. They can **not** be used for other parts of SQL, such as
      table names, statements, etc.

conv
      A dictionary or mapping which controls how types are converted
      from MySQL to Python and vice versa.

      If the key is a MySQL type (from ``FIELD_TYPE.*``), then the value
      can be either:

      * a callable object which takes a string argument (the MySQL
        value),' returning a Python value

      * a sequence of 2-tuples, where the first value is a combination
	of flags from ``MySQLdb.constants.FLAG``, and the second value
	is a function as above. The sequence is tested until the flags
	on the field match those of the first value. If both values
	are None, then the default conversion is done. Presently this
	is only used to distinquish TEXT and BLOB columns.

      If the key is a Python type or class, then the value is a
      callable Python object (usually a function) taking two arguments
      (value to convert, and the conversion dictionary) which converts
      values of this type to a SQL literal string value.

      This is initialized with reasonable defaults for most
      types. When creating a Connection object, you can pass your own
      type converter dictionary as a keyword parameter. Otherwise, it
      uses a copy of ``MySQLdb.converters.conversions``.  Several
      non-standard types are returned as strings, which is how MySQL
      returns all columns. For more details, see the built-in module
      documentation.


Connection Objects
..................

Connection objects are returned by the ``connect()`` function.

commit()
      If the database and the tables support transactions, this
      commits the current transaction; otherwise this method
      successfully does nothing.

rollback()
      If the database and tables support transactions, this rolls back
      (cancels) the current transaction; otherwise a
      ``NotSupportedError`` is raised.

cursor([cursorclass])
      MySQL does not support cursors; however, cursors are easily
      emulated.  You can supply an alternative cursor class as an
      optional parameter.  If this is not present, it defaults to the
      value given when creating the connection object, or the standard
      ``Cursor`` class. Also see the additional supplied cursor
      classes in the usage section.

There are many more methods defined on the connection object which
are MySQL-specific. For more information on them, consult the internal
documentation using ``pydoc``.


Cursor Objects
..............

callproc(procname, args)
      Calls stored procedure procname with the sequence of arguments
      in args. Returns the original arguments. Stored procedure
      support only works with MySQL-5.0 and newer.

      **Compatibility note:** PEP-249_ specifies that if there are
      OUT or INOUT parameters, the modified values are to be
      returned. This is not consistently possible with MySQL. Stored
      procedure arguments must be passed as server variables, and
      can only be returned with a SELECT statement. Since a stored
      procedure may return zero or more result sets, it is impossible
      for MySQLdb to determine if there are result sets to fetch
      before the modified parmeters are accessible.

      The parameters are stored in the server as @_*procname*_*n*,
      where *n* is the position of the parameter. I.e., if you
      cursor.callproc('foo', (a, b, c)), the parameters will be
      accessible by a SELECT statement as @_foo_0, @_foo_1, and
      @_foo_2.

      **Compatibility note:** It appears that the mere act of
      executing the CALL statement produces an empty result set, which
      appears after any result sets which might be generated by the
      stored procedure. Thus, you will always need to use nextset() to
      advance result sets.

close()
      Closes the cursor. Future operations raise ``ProgrammingError``.
      If you are using server-side cursors, it is very important to
      close the cursor when you are done with it and before creating a
      new one.

info()
      Returns some information about the last query. Normally
      you don't need to check this. If there are any MySQL 
      warnings, it will cause a Warning to be issued through
      the Python warning module. By default, Warning causes a
      message to appear on the console. However, it is possible
      to filter these out or cause Warning to be raised as exception.
      See the MySQL docs for ``mysql_info()``, and the Python warning
      module. (Non-standard)

setinputsizes()
      Does nothing, successfully.

setoutputsizes()
      Does nothing, successfully.

nextset()
      Advances the cursor to the next result set, discarding the remaining
      rows in the current result set. If there are no additional result
      sets, it returns None; otherwise it returns a true value.

      Note that MySQL doesn't support multiple result sets until 4.1.
      

Some examples
.............

The ``connect()`` method works nearly the same as with `_mysql`_::

    import MySQLdb
    db=MySQLdb.connect(passwd="moonpie",db="thangs")

To perform a query, you first need a cursor, and then you can execute
queries on it::

    c=db.cursor()
    max_price=5
    c.execute("""SELECT spam, eggs, sausage FROM breakfast
              WHERE price < %s""", (max_price,))

In this example, ``max_price=5`` Why, then, use ``%s`` in the
string? Because MySQLdb will convert it to a SQL literal value, which
is the string '5'. When it's finished, the query will actually say,
"...WHERE price < 5".

Why the tuple? Because the DB API requires you to pass in any
parameters as a sequence. Due to the design of the parser, (max_price)
is interpreted as using algebraic grouping and simply as max_price and
not a tuple. Adding a comma, i.e. (max_price,) forces it to make a
tuple.

And now, the results::

    >>> c.fetchone()
    (3L, 2L, 0L)

Quite unlike the ``_mysql`` example, this returns a single tuple,
which is the row, and the values are properly converted by default...
except... What's with the L's?

As mentioned earlier, while MySQL's INTEGER column translates
perfectly into a Python integer, UNSIGNED INTEGER could overflow, so
these values are converted to Python long integers instead.

If you wanted more rows, you could use ``c.fetchmany(n)`` or
``c.fetchall()``. These do exactly what you think they do. On
``c.fetchmany(n)``, the ``n`` is optional and defaults to
``c.arraysize``, which is normally 1. Both of these methods return a
sequence of rows, or an empty sequence if there are no more rows.  If
you use a weird cursor class, the rows themselves might not be tuples.

Note that in contrast to the above, ``c.fetchone()`` returns ``None``
when there are no more rows to fetch.

The only other method you are very likely to use is when you have to
do a multi-row insert::

   c.executemany(
	 """INSERT INTO breakfast (name, spam, eggs, sausage, price)
	 VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s, %s)""",
	 [
	 ("Spam and Sausage Lover's Plate", 5, 1, 8, 7.95 ),
	 ("Not So Much Spam Plate", 3, 2, 0, 3.95 ),
	 ("Don't Wany ANY SPAM! Plate", 0, 4, 3, 5.95 )
	 ] )

Here we are inserting three rows of five values. Notice that there is
a mix of types (strings, ints, floats) though we still only use
``%s``. And also note that we only included format strings for one
row. MySQLdb picks those out and duplicates them for each row.

Using and extending
-------------------

In general, it is probably wise to not directly interact with the DB
API except for small applicatons. Databases, even SQL databases, vary
widely in capabilities and may have non-standard features. The DB API
does a good job of providing a reasonably portable interface but some
methods are non-portable. Specifically, the parameters accepted by
``connect()`` are completely implementation-dependent.

If you believe your application may need to run on several different
databases, the author recommends the following approach, based on
personal experience: Write a simplified API for your application which
implements the specific queries and operations your application needs
to perform. Implement this API as a base class which should be have
few database dependencies, and then derive a subclass from this which
implements the necessary dependencies. In this way, porting your
application to a new database should be a relatively simple matter of
creating a new subclass, assuming the new database is reasonably
standard.

Because MySQLdb's Connection and Cursor objects are written in Python,
you can easily derive your own subclasses. There are several Cursor
classes in MySQLdb.cursors:

BaseCursor
    The base class for Cursor objects.  This does not raise Warnings.

CursorStoreResultMixIn
    Causes the Cursor to use the ``mysql_store_result()`` function to
    get the query result. The entire result set is stored on the
    client side.

CursorUseResultMixIn
    Causes the cursor to use the ``mysql_use_result()`` function to
    get the query result. The result set is stored on the server side
    and is transferred row by row using fetch operations.

CursorTupleRowsMixIn
    Causes the cursor to return rows as a tuple of the column values.

CursorDictRowsMixIn

    Causes the cursor to return rows as a dictionary, where the keys
    are column names and the values are column values. Note that if
    the column names are not unique, i.e., you are selecting from two
    tables that share column names, some of them will be rewritten as
    ``table.column``.  This can be avoided by using the SQL ``AS``
    keyword. (This is yet-another reason not to use ``*`` in SQL
    queries, particularly where ``JOIN`` is involved.)

Cursor
    The default cursor class. This class is composed of
    ``CursorWarningMixIn``, ``CursorStoreResultMixIn``,
    ``CursorTupleRowsMixIn,`` and ``BaseCursor``, i.e. it raises
    ``Warning``, uses ``mysql_store_result()``, and returns rows as
    tuples.

DictCursor
    Like ``Cursor`` except it returns rows as dictionaries.

SSCursor
    A "server-side" cursor. Like ``Cursor`` but uses
    ``CursorUseResultMixIn``.  Use only if you are dealing with
    potentially large result sets.

SSDictCursor
    Like ``SSCursor`` except it returns rows as dictionaries.


Embedded Server
---------------

Instead of connecting to a stand-alone server over the network,
the embedded server support lets you run a full server right in
your Python code or application server.

If you have built MySQLdb with embedded server support, there
are two additional functions you will need to make use of:

  server_init(args, groups)
    Initialize embedded server. If this client is not linked against
    the embedded server library, this function does nothing.

    args
	sequence of command-line arguments
    groups
	sequence of groups to use in defaults files

  server_end()
    Shut down embedded server. If not using an embedded server, this
    does nothing.

See the MySQL documentation for more information on the embedded
server.



:Title: MySQLdb: a Python interface for MySQL
:Author: Andy Dustman
:Version: $Revision$