MYSQLdb Connection in Python

Difficulty Level : Medium
Last Updated : 13 Jan, 2021

In this article, I have discussed how to connect to MySQL database remotely using python. For any application, it is very important to store the database on a server for easy data access. It is quite complicated to connect to the database remotely because every service provider doesn’t provide remote access to the MySQL database. Here I am using python’s MySQLdb module for connecting to our database which is at any server that provides remote access.

What is MYSQLdb?

MySQLdb is an interface for connecting to a MySQL database server from Python. It implements the Python Database API v2.0 and is built on top of the MySQL C API.
Packages to Install

mysql-connector-python
mysql-python

If using anaconda

conda install -c anaconda mysql-python
conda install -c anaconda mysql-connector-python

else

pip install MySQL-python
pip install MySQL-python-connector

Import-Package

import MYSQLdb

How to connect to a remote MySQL database using python?

Before we start you should know the basics of SQL. Now let us discuss the methods used in this code:

connect(): This method is used for creating a connection to our database it has four arguments:

Server Name
Database User Name
Database Provider
Database Name

cursor(): This method creates a cursor object that is capable of executing SQL queries on the database.
execute(): This method is used for executing SQL queries on the database. It takes a sql query( as string) as an argument.
fetchone(): This method retrieves the next row of a query result set and returns a single sequence, or None if no more rows are available.
close() : This method close the database connection.

Free remote mysql database providers:
1.www.freemysqlhosting.net
2.www.heliohost.org

Python3

'''This code would not be run on geeksforgeeks IDE
because required module
are not installed on IDE. Also this code requires
a remote MySQL databaseconnection with valid
Hostname, Dbusername Password and Dbname''' 
 
# Module For Connecting To MySQL database
import MySQLdb
 
# Function for connecting to MySQL database
def mysqlconnect():
    #Trying to connect
    try:
        db_connection= MySQLdb.connect
        ("Hostname","dbusername","password","dbname")
    # If connection is not successful
    except:
        print("Can't connect to database")
        return 0
    # If Connection Is Successful
    print("Connected")
 
    # Making Cursor Object For Query Execution
    cursor=db_connection.cursor()
 
    # Executing Query
    cursor.execute("SELECT CURDATE();")
 
    # Above Query Gives Us The Current Date
    # Fetching Data
    m = cursor.fetchone()
 
    # Printing Result Of Above
    print("Today's Date Is ",m[0])
 
    # Closing Database Connection
    db_connection.close()
 
# Function Call For Connecting To Our Database
mysqlconnect()

Connected
Today's Date Is  2017-11-14

Python3

# Python code to illustrate and create a
# table in database
import mysql.connector as mysql
 
# Open database connection
db = mysql.connect(host="localhost",user="root",password="tiger",database="python")
 
cursor = db.cursor()
 
# Drop table if it already exist using execute()
cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS EMPLOYEE")
 
# Create table as per requirement
sql = "CREATE TABLE EMPLOYEE ( FNAME CHAR(20) NOT NULL, LNAME CHAR(20), AGE INT )"
 
cursor.execute(sql) #table created
 
# disconnect from server
db.close()