I think SQL is a very simple language, but ofcourse I'm biased. But even a simple statement might have more complexity to it than you might think. Do you know what the result is of this statement? SELECT FALSE = FALSE = TRUE; scroll down for the answer. The answer is: it depends. You might expect it to return false because the 3 items in the comparison are not equal. But that's not the case. In PostgreSQL this is the result: postgres=# SELECT FALSE = FALSE = TRUE; ?column? ---------- t (1 row) So it compares FALSE against FALSE, which results in TRUE and then That is compared against TRUE, which results in TRUE. PostgreSQL has proper boolean literals . Next up is MySQL: mysql> SELECT FALSE = FALSE = TRUE; +----------------------+ | FALSE = FALSE = TRUE | +----------------------+ | 1 | +----------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) This is similar but it's slightly different. The result is 1 because in My...

With Python you would normally use MySQL Connector/Python or the older MySQLdb to connect from Python to MySQL, but there are more options. There are also multiple Python implementations: CPython (the main implementation), PyPy , Jython and IronPython . PyPy tries to be faster than CPython by using a Just-in-Time compiler. Jython runs on the JVM and IronPython runs on the .NET CLR . Connector/Python by default (Without the C Extension) is a pure Python implementation and can work with most if not all implementations. And for MySQLdb there is a drop-in replacement called PyMySQL , which is a pure python implementation. So there are many options already. But for at least Jython it is also possible to use a Java (JDBC) driver. But why would you use a different Python implementation? There are multiple reasons for that: Speed. PyPy can be faster and Jython has no Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) , which can allow for more concurrent execution. To access 'native' code. e.g. ca...

I've ran a simple test to see the performance impact of TLS on MySQL connections with MySQL Connector/Python The test results are in this Jupyter notebook . TL;DR: Try to reuse connections if you use TLS Establishing TLS connections is expensive (server & client) Improved performance might be possible in the future by using TLS Tickets Not tested: Difference between YaSSL and OpenSSL Difference between Ciphersuites Performance of larger resultsets and queries