When to close cursors using MySQLdb

Instead of asking what is standard practice, since that's often unclear and subjective, you might try looking to the module itself for guidance. In general, using the with keyword as another user suggested is a great idea, but in this specific circumstance it may not give you quite the functionality you expect.

As of version 1.2.5 of the module, MySQLdb.Connection implements the context manager protocol with the following code (github):

def __enter__(self):    if self.get_autocommit():        self.query("BEGIN")    return self.cursor()def __exit__(self, exc, value, tb):    if exc:        self.rollback()    else:        self.commit()

There are several existing Q&A about with already, or you can read Understanding Python's "with" statement, but essentially what happens is that __enter__ executes at the start of the with block, and __exit__ executes upon leaving the with block. You can use the optional syntax with EXPR as VAR to bind the object returned by __enter__ to a name if you intend to reference that object later. So, given the above implementation, here's a simple way to query your database:

connection = MySQLdb.connect(...)with connection as cursor:            # connection.__enter__ executes at this line    cursor.execute('select 1;')    result = cursor.fetchall()        # connection.__exit__ executes after this lineprint result                          # prints "((1L,),)"

The question now is, what are the states of the connection and the cursor after exiting the with block? The __exit__ method shown above calls only self.rollback() or self.commit(), and neither of those methods go on to call the close() method. The cursor itself has no __exit__ method defined – and wouldn't matter if it did, because with is only managing the connection. Therefore, both the connection and the cursor remain open after exiting the with block. This is easily confirmed by adding the following code to the above example:

try:    cursor.execute('select 1;')    print 'cursor is open;',except MySQLdb.ProgrammingError:    print 'cursor is closed;',if connection.open:    print 'connection is open'else:    print 'connection is closed'

You should see the output "cursor is open; connection is open" printed to stdout.

I believe you need to close the cursor before committing the connection.

Why? The MySQL C API, which is the basis for MySQLdb, does not implement any cursor object, as implied in the module documentation: "MySQL does not support cursors; however, cursors are easily emulated." Indeed, the MySQLdb.cursors.BaseCursor class inherits directly from object and imposes no such restriction on cursors with regard to commit/rollback. An Oracle developer had this to say:

cnx.commit() before cur.close() sounds most logical to me. Maybe you can go by the rule: "Close the cursor if you do not need it anymore." Thus commit() before closing the cursor. In the end, for Connector/Python, it does not make much difference, but or other databases it might.

I expect that's as close as you're going to get to "standard practice" on this subject.

Is there any significant advantage to finding sets of transactions that don't require intermediate commits so that you don't have to get new cursors for each transaction?

I very much doubt it, and in trying to do so, you may introduce additional human error. Better to decide on a convention and stick with it.

Is there a lot of overhead for getting new cursors, or is it just not a big deal?

The overhead is negligible, and doesn't touch the database server at all; it's entirely within the implementation of MySQLdb. You can look at BaseCursor.__init__ on github if you're really curious to know what's happening when you create a new cursor.

Going back to earlier when we were discussing with, perhaps now you can understand why the MySQLdb.Connection class __enter__ and __exit__ methods give you a brand new cursor object in every with block and don't bother keeping track of it or closing it at the end of the block. It's fairly lightweight and exists purely for your convenience.

If it's really that important to you to micromanage the cursor object, you can use contextlib.closing to make up for the fact that the cursor object has no defined __exit__ method. For that matter, you can also use it to force the connection object to close itself upon exiting a with block. This should output "my_curs is closed; my_conn is closed":

from contextlib import closingimport MySQLdbwith closing(MySQLdb.connect(...)) as my_conn:    with closing(my_conn.cursor()) as my_curs:        my_curs.execute('select 1;')        result = my_curs.fetchall()try:    my_curs.execute('select 1;')    print 'my_curs is open;',except MySQLdb.ProgrammingError:    print 'my_curs is closed;',if my_conn.open:    print 'my_conn is open'else:    print 'my_conn is closed'

Note that with closing(arg_obj) will not call the argument object's __enter__ and __exit__ methods; it will only call the argument object's close method at the end of the with block. (To see this in action, simply define a class Foo with __enter__, __exit__, and close methods containing simple print statements, and compare what happens when you do with Foo(): pass to what happens when you do with closing(Foo()): pass.) This has two significant implications:

First, if autocommit mode is enabled, MySQLdb will BEGIN an explicit transaction on the server when you use with connection and commit or rollback the transaction at the end of the block. These are default behaviors of MySQLdb, intended to protect you from MySQL's default behavior of immediately committing any and all DML statements. MySQLdb assumes that when you use a context manager, you want a transaction, and uses the explicit BEGIN to bypass the autocommit setting on the server. If you're used to using with connection, you might think autocommit is disabled when actually it was only being bypassed. You might get an unpleasant surprise if you add closing to your code and lose transactional integrity; you won't be able to rollback changes, you may start seeing concurrency bugs and it may not be immediately obvious why.

Second, with closing(MySQLdb.connect(user, pass)) as VAR binds the connection object to VAR, in contrast to with MySQLdb.connect(user, pass) as VAR, which binds a new cursor object to VAR. In the latter case you would have no direct access to the connection object! Instead, you would have to use the cursor's connection attribute, which provides proxy access to the original connection. When the cursor is closed, its connection attribute is set to None. This results in an abandoned connection that will stick around until one of the following happens:

• All references to the cursor are removed
• The cursor goes out of scope
• The connection times out
• The connection is closed manually via server administration tools

You can test this by monitoring open connections (in Workbench or by using SHOW PROCESSLIST) while executing the following lines one by one:

with MySQLdb.connect(...) as my_curs:    passmy_curs.close()my_curs.connection          # Nonemy_curs.connection.close()  # throws AttributeError, but connection still opendel my_curs                 # connection will close here

It's better to rewrite it using 'with' keyword. 'With' will take care about closing cursor (it's important because it's unmanaged resource) automatically. The benefit is it will close cursor in case of exception too.

from contextlib import closingimport MySQLdb''' At the beginning you open a DB connection. Particular moment when  you open connection depends from your approach:  - it can be inside the same function where you work with cursors  - in the class constructor  - etc'''db = MySQLdb.connect("host", "user", "pass", "database")with closing(db.cursor()) as cur:    cur.execute("somestuff")    results = cur.fetchall()    # do stuff with results    cur.execute("insert operation")    # call commit if you do INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operations    db.commit()    cur.execute("someotherstuff")    results2 = cur.fetchone()    # do stuff with results2# at some point when you decided that you do not need# the open connection anymore you close itdb.close()

^{Note: this answer is for PyMySQL, which is a drop-in replacement for MySQLdb and effectively the latest version of MySQLdb since MySQLdb stopped being maintained. I believe everything here is also true of the legacy MySQLdb, but haven't checked.}

First of all, some facts:

• Python's with syntax calls the context manager's __enter__ method before executing the body of the with block, and its __exit__ method afterwards.
• Connections have an __enter__ method that does nothing besides create and return a cursor, and an __exit__ method that either commits or rolls back (depending upon whether an exception was thrown). It does not close the connection.
• Cursors in PyMySQL are purely an abstraction implemented in Python; there is no equivalent concept in MySQL itself.¹
• Cursors have an __enter__ method that doesn't do anything and an __exit__ method which "closes" the cursor (which just means nulling the cursor's reference to its parent connection and throwing away any data stored on the cursor).
• Cursors hold a reference to the connection that spawned them, but connections don't hold a reference to the cursors that they've created.
• Connections have a __del__ method which closes them
• Per https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html, CPython (the default Python implementation) uses reference counting and automatically deletes an object once the number of references to it hits zero.

Putting these things together, we see that naive code like this is in theory problematic:

# Problematic code, at least in theory!import pymysqlwith pymysql.connect() as cursor:    cursor.execute('SELECT 1')# ... happily carry on and do something unrelated

The problem is that nothing has closed the connection. Indeed, if you paste the code above into a Python shell and then run SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST at a MySQL shell, you'll be able to see the idle connection that you created. Since MySQL's default number of connections is 151, which isn't huge, you could theoretically start running into problems if you had many processes keeping these connections open.

However, in CPython, there is a saving grace that ensures that code like my example above probably won't cause you to leave around loads of open connections. That saving grace is that as soon as cursor goes out of scope (e.g. the function in which it was created finishes, or cursor gets another value assigned to it), its reference count hits zero, which causes it to be deleted, dropping the connection's reference count to zero, causing the connection's __del__ method to be called which force-closes the connection. If you already pasted the code above into your Python shell, then you can now simulate this by running cursor = 'arbitrary value'; as soon as you do this, the connection you opened will vanish from the SHOW PROCESSLIST output.

However, relying upon this is inelegant, and theoretically might fail in Python implementations other than CPython. Cleaner, in theory, would be to explicitly .close() the connection (to free up a connection on the database without waiting for Python to destroy the object). This more robust code looks like this:

import contextlibimport pymysqlwith contextlib.closing(pymysql.connect()) as conn:    with conn as cursor:        cursor.execute('SELECT 1')

This is ugly, but doesn't rely upon Python destructing your objects to free up your (finite available number of) database connections.

Note that closing the cursor, if you're already closing the connection explicitly like this, is entirely pointless.

Finally, to answer the secondary questions here:

Is there a lot of overhead for getting new cursors, or is it just not a big deal?

Nope, instantiating a cursor doesn't hit MySQL at all and basically does nothing.

Is there any significant advantage to finding sets of transactions that don't require intermediate commits so that you don't have to get new cursors for each transaction?

This is situational and difficult to give a general answer to. As https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/en/optimizing-innodb-transaction-management.html puts it, "an application might encounter performance issues if it commits thousands of times per second, and different performance issues if it commits only every 2-3 hours". You pay a performance overhead for every commit, but by leaving transactions open for longer, you increase the chance of other connections having to spend time waiting for locks, increase your risk of deadlocks, and potentially increase the cost of some lookups performed by other connections.

^{1 MySQL does have a construct it calls a cursor but they only exist inside stored procedures; they're completely different to PyMySQL cursors and are not relevant here.}