🔗 Connecting Odoo with a MySQL Database using PyMySQL: A Practical Guide

When building scalable enterprise solutions with Odoo, there are times you need to connect to external databases to enrich your models with data from legacy systems or third-party applications. In this article, I will demonstrate how to integrate an external MySQL database with your Odoo custom module using the lightweight and powerful PyMySQL library.

📦 Why PyMySQL?

PyMySQL is a pure Python MySQL client library that allows easy database operations without any C dependencies, making it ideal for Odoo deployments on various Linux servers or containers.

🔧 Step 1: Install the Required Library

First, ensure pymysql is installed in your Odoo environment:

pip install pymysql

📝 Step 2: The Python Code for Database Connection

Below is a practical implementation within an Odoo model to connect to a MySQL database, fetch buyer data, and dynamically populate a selection field.

from odoo import api, fields, models, _
import pymysql
from pymysql.cursors import DictCursor
import logging

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

class BuyerReport(models.Model):
    _name = 'buyer.report'
    _inherit = ['mail.thread', 'mail.activity.mixin']
    _description = 'Buyer Report'

    def _connect_to_db(self):
        try:
            connection =…