How to efficiently use MySQLDB SScursor?

Question

I have to deal with a large result set (could be hundreds thousands of rows, sometimes more).
They unfortunately need to be retrieved all at once (on start up).

Answer 1

I am in agreement with Otto Allmendinger's answer, but to make explicit Denis Otkidach's comment, here is how you can iterate over the results without using Otto's fetch() function:

import MySQLdb.cursors
connection=MySQLdb.connect(
    host="thehost",user="theuser",
    passwd="thepassword",db="thedb",
    cursorclass = MySQLdb.cursors.SSCursor)
cursor=connection.cursor()
cursor.execute(query)
for row in cursor:
    print(row)