How to use python mysqldb to insert many rows at once

Solution 1:

From MySQLdb User's Guide:

c.executemany(
      """INSERT INTO breakfast (name, spam, eggs, sausage, price)
      VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s, %s)""",
      [
      ("Spam and Sausage Lover's Plate", 5, 1, 8, 7.95 ),
      ("Not So Much Spam Plate", 3, 2, 0, 3.95 ),
      ("Don't Wany ANY SPAM! Plate", 0, 4, 3, 5.95 )
      ] )

so in your case:

c.executemany("insert into T (F1,F2) values (%s, %s)",
    [('a','b'),('c','d')])

Solution 2:

It's possible to insert all rows in one single statement like @adamhajari, and avoid sql injections like @zenpoy, at the same time. You just need to create a big insert statement and let mysqldb's execute do the formatting.

values_to_insert = [('a','b'),('c','d')]
query = "INSERT INTO T (F1, F2) VALUES " + ",".join("(%s, %s)" for _ in values_to_insert)
flattened_values = [item for sublist in values_to_insert for item in sublist]
c.execute(query, flattened_values)

Not super readable, but can be slightly faster than executemany (I tried inserting batches of 50000 rows in a local DB, executemany was 20% slower).