The Sad State of MySQL Python

I admit it. I was a friend of MySQL. Two years ago MySQL was the only database server I was using at all. Lately however I replaced nearly all applications that were still using MySQL with postgres and even SQLite. One of the applications that is still using MySQL is Inyoka, the portal software deployed ubuntuusers. For reasons you don't want to know we are unable to switch the deployment setup from MySQL to postgres.

Now that would be fine if mysql-python aka MySQLdb would not suck so much. Besides not supporting the latest MySQL features it also leaks memory a lot. A friend of mine who discovered the problem, noticed a couple of lost megabytes the minute on ubuntuusers — that's a lot.

That problem seems to be fixed in the SVN trunk but the latest activity there was more than 9 months ago which is a problem. Neither the cheeseshop`^W^W`pypi has non-leaking packages, also not Linux distributions such as debian or ubuntu. The development blog was last updated in May of 2008 which makes me even more concerned.

Now I wonder if anyone has experience with the MySQL library and the Python API to take over the development. I guess there are still some MySQL users left, even though the project has an incredible bad reputation lately due to problems in the release management.

As a temporary workaround I can recommend either updating to the trunk version (which seems to be unstable according to one of the last commit messages) or disable unicode support where the leak apparently is. Nice libraries such as SQLAlchemy can convert bytestrings to unicode automatically on their own as well if you tell them to.