Native ODBC access for python on linux?

[callmebill at gmail.com]

Can you tell me what I have to use in order to utilize the MySQL native
API?  There's some gap (chasm, really) in my knowledge that is keeping
me from following that route.  If you could provide a small example or
a couple names, that would be extremely helpful.

Thanks again for your time.

Larry Bates wrote:
> ODBC is a vanilla interface that puts a layer between the program
> and the database.  In theory, this would allow you to write a
> program that supports ODBC compliant databases and it would work
> with any of them.  In practice it always seems like this doesn't
> work as well as everyone had hoped (performance is quite often a
> problem with ODBC interface and time/date handling can be an
> issue).
>
> There are people that provide ODBC drivers for Linux but normally
> they are used to communcate back to MSSQL servers or other Windows
> applications from Linux box.
>
> The native interfaces are almost always better performing and
> support more features because ODBC is basically a lowest common
> denominator approach.  The native API can provide access to all
> the (even unique) features of the particular database
>
> IMHO-For Python to MySQL on Linux use the native interface is
> the way to go.
>
> Larry Bates
>
> callmebill at gmail.com wrote:
> > I'm getting my feet wet with making Python talk to MySQL via ODBC.  I
> > started on Windows, and it went smoothly enough due to the ODBC stuff
> > that apparently is native to Python at least on windows (I've been
> > following ch. 13 of Mark Hammond's py on win32 book).
> >
> > But now I'm trying to do equivalent stuff on linux (Fedora Core 3) with
> > python 2.3.5 and mysql.  I'd like to stick with packages that are
> > native to python, rather than relying on external stuff (e.g., MySQLdb
> > and mxODBC).  Is this possible, or do I have to use 3rd party pieces to
> > use ODBC with Python under linux?
> >
> >
> > As an aside, I've only used ODBC to access db's, period.  I've never
> > used, for example, MySQL's API for working with a MySQL db.  I'm
> > curious to see what that looks like, if anyone has any examples
> > (python, c, or otherwise).
> > 
> > Thanks in advance for any help.
> > -Bill
> >