The following lists the arguments which can be used to initiate a connection with the MySQL server using either:

* Synonymous argument name, available only for compatibility with other Python MySQL drivers. Oracle recommends not to use these alternative names.

Authentication with MySQL will use username and password. Note that MySQL Connector/Python does not support the old, insecure password protocols of MySQL versions prior to 4.1.

When the database parameter is given, the current database is set to the given value. To later change the database, execute the MySQL USE command or set the database property of the MySQLConnection instance.

By default, Connector/Python tries to connect to a MySQL server running on localhost using TCP/IP. The host argument defaults to IP address 127.0.0.1 and port to 3306. Unix sockets are supported by setting unix_socket. Named pipes on the Windows platform are not supported.

Strings coming from MySQL are by default returned as Python Unicode literals. To change this behavior, set use_unicode to False. You can change the character setting for the client connection through the charset argument. To change the character set after connecting to MySQL, set the charset property of the MySQLConnection instance. This technique is preferred over using the MySQL SET NAMES statement directly. Similar to the charset property, you can set the collation for the current MySQL session.

Transactions are not automatically committed; call the commit() method of the MySQLConnection instance within your application after doing a set of related insert, update, and delete operations. For data consistency and high throughput for write operations, it is best to leave the autocommit configuration option turned off when using InnoDB or other transactional tables.

The time zone can be set per connection using the time_zone argument. This is useful if the MySQL server is set, for example, to UTC and TIMESTAMP values should be returned by MySQL converted to the PST time zone.

MySQL supports so called SQL Modes. which will change the behavior of the server globally or per connection. For example, to have warnings raised as errors, set sql_mode to TRADITIONAL. For more information, see Section 5.1.7, “Server SQL Modes”.

Warnings generated by queries are fetched automatically when get_warnings is set to True. You can also immediately raise an exception by setting raise_on_warnings to True. Consider using the MySQL sql_mode setting for turning warnings into errors.

To set a timeout value for connections, use connection_timeout.

MySQL uses client flags to enable or disable features. Using the client_flags argument, you have control of what is set. To find out what flags are available, use the following:

from mysql.connector.constants import ClientFlag
print '\n'.join(ClientFlag.get_full_info())

If client_flags is not specified (that is, it is zero), defaults are used for MySQL v4.1 and later. If you specify an integer greater than 0, make sure all flags are set. A better way to set and unset flags is to use a list. For example, to set FOUND_ROWS, but disable the default LONG_FLAG:

flags = [ClientFlag.FOUND_ROWS, -ClientFlag.LONG_FLAG]
mysql.connector.connect(client_flags=flags)

By default, MySQL Connector/Python does not buffer or pre-fetch results. This means that after a query is executed, your program is responsible of fetching the data. This avoids using excessive memory when queries return large result sets. If you know that the result set is small enough to handle all at once, fetching the results immediately by setting buffered to True. It is also possible to set this per cursor (see cursor manual).

MySQL types will be converted automatically to Python types. For example, a DATETIME column becomes a datetime.datetime object. When conversion should be done differently, for example to get better performance, set raw to True.

Using SSL connections is possible when your Python installation supports SSL, that is, when it is compiled against the OpenSSL libraries. When you provide the arguments ssl_ca, ssl_key and ssl_cert, the connection switches to SSL. You can use this in combination with the compressed argument set to True.

passwd, db and connect_timeout are valid for compatibility with other MySQL interfaces and are respectively the same as password, database and connection_timeout. The latter take precedence. Data source name syntax or dsn is not used; if specified, it raises a NotSupportedError exception.