On Fri, 12 May 2006 14:01:51 +0000, John Salerno wrote: > Ok, I've been browsing through the MySQLdb docs, and I *think* I know > the kind of code I need to write (connect, cursor, manipulate data, > commmit, etc. -- although I probably need to get more familiar with > actual SQL commands too), but here's my problem: I don't know where > these scripts are supposed to be executed, or how they are supposed to > 'find' the database.
I'm kind of a noob myself, but I'll see if I can't offer some useful info anyhow. When you issue your MySQLdb.connect, that determines where the database actions occur. If you specify "host='localhost'", then you are trying to connect to your local machine. If you specify "host='db.smurgle.net'", you're trying to connect to my home db server. You can specify the hostname in any format that your local machine understands; for example, if you are on a Linux box, and your /etc/hosts file contains a line like: 10.0.0.10 myDBserver then you can use "host='myDBserver'". This isn't so much a web programming issue as it is using MySQL's network interface. MySQL by default uses port 3306 (I think) to handle database connections over the network. > But my question is, can these DB scripts be executed anywhere, and they > will find the DB based on the connect() parameters? Or do I need to do > something special with them? It seems like a similar problem to when you > don't have your PYTHONPATH variable set up properly. I've tried some DB > stuff, but it doesn't seem to work. Your scripts that make connections can be executed from anywhere that: 1) knows how to communicate with the specified database server, and 2) has some sort of MySQL client available. > So without actually giving you some code and tracebacks, is there any > general advice about how to set up these scripts? Also, is there any > better documentation than this: > http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=32071&group_id=22307 If you are having problems, by all means post some code. > It doesn't seem too thorough, and it also doesn't cover actual SQL > queries that you'd have to pass to the query method. Maybe I will just > have to find that information in a MySQL tutorial. A couple of good MySQL tutorials would most likely be a big help. The standard docs (the ones you pointed out) are not of a great deal of help if you're totally new to SQL. You might want to do a Google search. This will lead you to pages like: http://www.kitebird.com/articles/pydbapi.html http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/MySQL-Connectivity-With-Python/ and the like. Dan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list