Connect to an MySQL Database via Python

How to connect your Python Notebook to MySQL Databases

Photo by Rafael Hoyos Weht on Unsplash

Often, data scientists or analysts have to access databases for example for ad-hoc analysis. Often, these are MySQL databases, here you can use the MySQL Connector to access a MySQL database from a Jupyter notebook.

First step is to install the connector via !pip install command:

!pip install mysql-connector-python

After that you can already use the library and connect to the database:

#Import the Connector
import mysql.connector
# Connecting to the database
conn = mysql.connector.connect(user = ‘username’,host = ‘localhost’,database = ‘database_name’)

And with the help of a cursor object you can then query tables:

# Initialize a Cursor Object
cursorObject = dataBase.cursor()
# Select Query
query = "SELECT NAME, FORNAME FROM CUSTOMER"
cursorObject.execute(query)
result = cursorObject.fetchall()

From here on, you can use the result for data preparation and aggregation. Last but not least — always disconnect from the server when done:

# Disconnect from Server
conn.close()