This method prepare the given database operation (query or command). The parameters found in the tuple or dictionary params are bound to the variables in the operation. Variables are specified using %s markers or named markers %(name)s.

For example, insert information about a new employee and selecting again the data of this person:

insert = (
"INSERT INTO employees (emp_no, first_name, last_name, hire_date) "
"VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s)")
data = (2, 'Jane', 'Doe', datetime.date(2012, 3, 23))
cursor.execute(insert, data)
select = "SELECT * FROM employees WHERE emp_no = %(emp_no)s"
cursor.execute(select, { 'emp_no': 2 })

Note that the data is converted from Python object to something MySQL understand. In the preceding example, the datetime.date() instance is converted to '2012-03-23'.

When multi is set to True, execute() is able to execute multiple statements. It returns an iterator which makes it possible to go through all results for each statement. Note that using parameters is not working well in this case, and it is usually a good idea to execute each statement on its own.

In the following example we select and insert data in one operation and display the result:

operation = 'SELECT 1; INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (); SELECT 2'
for result in cursor.execute(operation):
  if result.with_rows:
    print("Statement '{}' has following rows:".format(
      result.statement))
    print(result.fetchall())
  else:
    print("Affected row(s) by query '{}' was {}".format(
      result.statement, result.rowcount))

If the connection was configured to fetch warnings, warnings generated by the operation are available through the MySQLCursor.fetchwarnings() method.

Returns an iterator when multi is True.