Here’s a thing. I wanted to build a small utility to automate a task which would be handy, which I don’t need right now, but which I reckon would take about 8-10 hours to build in Python. So as I have some time, I’m doing it now.
For it to do what I want, I need the script to be able to read and write to a MySQL database. I chose that one because MySQL is open source and also because compared to Oracle 11g it uses fewer resources on my laptop. This is not going to be a big utility and I really don’t need serious heavy lifting at this point in time. But I do need the MySQL Python connector library.
So far, so good. I don’t have the connector library installed, and need to go and get it from Oracle.
To do this, I need to sign into Oracle. Fine. Password forgotten, so password reset, nuisance, but there you go. It’s a fact of life with things like this.
Once signed in, oh wait, now I have to answer some survey. They want to know what I’m using it for, what industry sector, how many employees, what sort of application, and then they offer me a list of reasons for which they can contact me further. Not on the list is “You don’t need to contact me”.
I’m not trying to download MySQL. I already have it installed. I just want a library that will enable me to write some code to connect a Python script to an existing install.
Downloading a single library really should be a lot easier.