MySQLdb.cursor.execute can't run multiple queries

Like all Python DB-API 2.0 implementations, the cursor.execute() method is designed take only one statement, because it makes guarantees about the state of the cursor afterward.

Use the cursor.executemany() method instead. Do note that, as per the DB-API 2.0 specification:

Use of this method for an operation which produces one or more result sets constitutes undefined behavior, and the implementation is permitted (but not required) to raise an exception when it detects that a result set has been created by an invocation of the operation.

Using this for multiple INSERT statements should be just fine:

cursor.executemany('INSERT INTO table_name VALUES (%s)',
    [(1,), ("non-integer value",)]
)

If you need to execute a series of disparate statements like from a script, then for most cases you can just split the statements on ; and feed each statement to cursor.execute() separately.

I think you need to pass multi=True to execute when using multiple statements, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-python/en/connector-python-api-mysqlcursor-execute.html

Update: This applies to the mysql.connector module, not MySQLdb used in this case.

Apparently there is no way to do this in MySQLdb (aka. MySQL-python), so we ended up just communicateing the data to subprocess.Popen([mysql, ...], stdin=subprocess.PIPE) and checking the returncode.