[DB-SIG] [ANNOUNCEMENT] MySQLdb-0.1.3 released

[Andy Dustman]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Andy Dustman wrote:
> > 
> > cursor.fetchrow(), of course, returns the result as a sequence of values,
> > usually a tuple. cursor.fetchrowDict() returns the result as a dictionary,
> > where the keys are the column names and the values are the column values.
> 
> How does this help with columns which are the result of
> a SQL function, e.g. select max(value) from table ?

You'd probably want to use AS to rename computed columns, e.g.,

SELECT MAX(value) AS max_value FROM table;
 
> Wouldn't the same functionality be available by simply
> merging the information from cursor.description and the
> result of .fetchone() (that's how my own abstract DB class works,
> BTW) ?

Yep, and that's essentially what fetchoneDict() is doing. fetchoneDict()
could have been implemented in Python to do that, but in this case, it's
done in C: conn.fetch_row_as_dict(), conn.fetch_rows_as_dict(n),
conn.fetch_all_rows_as_dict()); where conn is a _mysql.MYSQL connection
object. result.describe() produces the DB API description tuple from some
MySQL structures; where result is a _mySQL.MYSQL_RES result object. The
various fetch_XXX_as_dict() methods just get this information directly out
of some C data structures.

And, one of the things about MySQLdb is, since the top-level interface IS
written in Python, you can directly subclass the Connection and Cursor
objects (rather than writing wrappers), so really someone could have just
added this on as their own subclass. Let's just say it's there due to
popular demand, and documentated as non-portable.

-- 
andy dustman       |     programmer/analyst     |      comstar.net, inc.
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