From https://www.psycopg.org/docs/sql.html
"The module contains objects and functions useful to generate SQL dynamically, in a convenient and safe way." If there's nothing dynamic about the text of the query, then you don't really need to go through all the trouble of using all those classes. They're there in case you're getting unknown table names from a user, or building a query on the fly, etc. If you know the query right now, you can just put it into a text string, and call it good. So your query2 might look something like this: query = """select p.lname, p.fname, p.loc_nbr, p.job_title, p.direct_phone, p.active, c.org_name, l.loc_nbr, l.loc_name, a.act_date, a.act_type, a.notes, a.next_contact from people as p inner join companies as c on c.org_nbr = p.org_nbr inner join locations as l on l.org_nbr = o.org_nbr and l.loc_nbr = p.loc_nbr inner join contacts as a on a.person_nbr = p.person_nbr where p.lname = %s and p.fname = %s group by a.act_date order by a.act_date;""" cur.execute(query, (lname_value, fname_value)) Note that I don't think this query of yours is gonna work as you've got a GROUP BY clause, and the SELECT list you have stuff that's not in the GROUP BY, and is not an aggregate.
