How do I perform an UPDATE of existing rows of a db table using a Pandas DataFrame?

I think the easiest way would be to:

first delete those rows that are going to be "upserted". This can be done in a loop, but it's not very efficient for bigger data sets (5K+ rows), so i'd save this slice of the DF into a temporary MySQL table:

# assuming we have already changed values in the rows and saved those changed rows in a separate DF: `x`
x = df[mask]  # `mask` should help us to find changed rows...

# make sure `x` DF has a Primary Key column as index
x = x.set_index('a')

# dump a slice with changed rows to temporary MySQL table
x.to_sql('my_tmp', engine, if_exists='replace', index=True)

conn = engine.connect()
trans = conn.begin()

try:
    # delete those rows that we are going to "upsert"
    engine.execute('delete from test_upsert where a in (select a from my_tmp)')
    trans.commit()

    # insert changed rows
    x.to_sql('test_upsert', engine, if_exists='append', index=True)
except:
    trans.rollback()
    raise

PS i didn't test this code so it might have some small bugs, but it should give you an idea...