Yes, it's very important to do it the first way! mysqldb has a bunch of Python->MySQL conversions. If you look at the source you can read converters.py -- it c

Yes, it's very important to do it the first way! mysqldb has a bunch of Python->MySQL conversions. If you look at the source you can read converters.py -- it can convert lists, strings, numbers, dates and a lot of other types too.