There is an unpleasant encoding issue with MySQLdb 1.2.1_p2 that apparently received attention and should have finally been fixed:

Date: 2006-08-26 11:49
Sender: adustman

Fixed in development version; please test 1.2.2b1 when
it is released (mysql-python-test).

While working with SQLObject (both on CGI and CherryPy), that caused me some headache. It also prevents using UTF-8 encoded tables on MySQL.

On machines I had full access to, I could temporarily get around the problem by using an older version, like 1.2.0, but that didn't seem to be the perfect solution. Unfortunately, those up-to-date hosting environments I use all have 1.2.1_p2 installed. Let's hope that will change very soon.

Update: A 1.2.2b1 release is available.

Update: I just started compiling the 1.2.2b1 test package, but then found it much easier to just replace line 146 (at least on my Debian machine) in cursors.py with this (as it is done in the test version):

if isinstance(query, unicode):
    query = query.encode(charset)

And it works! No need to wait for a new stable release anymore. Why didn't I do this earlier?!