Brian and I have troubles forcing sqlalchemy to do proper escaping/binding. The bottom line is that it is not clear how to do that even in plan mysqldb, we eg tried this: #!/usr/bin/python import MySQLdb con = MySQLdb.connect(unix_socket="/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock", user="becla") cursor = con.cursor() # this will create database called 'aaa' (with quotes!) # cursor.execute("CREATE DATABASE `%s`", ('aaa',)) # all these reports "wrong syntax" error # cursor.execute("CREATE DATABASE %s", ('aaa',)) # cursor.execute("CREATE DATABASE '%s'", ('aaa',)) cursor.close() con.close() Are we missing something obvious??? J. ######################################################################## Use REPLY-ALL to reply to list To unsubscribe from the QSERV-L list, click the following link: https://listserv.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=QSERV-L&A=1