There are no performance overhead except when you are dragging a huge chunk of information out of the database, in that case, python is converting the data to its tuple data type which adds one more processing.
I found this when I didn't have the priviledge to do "mysql> SELECT * FROM TBL INTO OUTFILE;", I used python MySQLdb first, which I later found sufficiently slower enough than using >>>system("echo 'USE db; SELECT * FROM TBL;' |mysql >outfile") But this is the minor case. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list