Today feels like a great day to revisit this classic post from Stian Søiland. The good news is that, since originally posting this way back in July of '04, I have only seen one or two other variations of this driver-less SQL sent in ...

When asked to fix an application here at the university that lets students create their own mailinglists, I stumbled over this python script that tries to synchronize database entries with Mailman.

In addition to exploring how to create ugly code with Python, the author has discovered a way to avoid compiling a MySQL driver for Python - by using the "mysql" shell tool and parsing the output by splitting it by whitespace. (This will of course fail if anything resembling a space is present in the database)

Also notice the creation of mysql_cmds.txt for stuff to be executed by the SQL server.