Simple routine to call mysqldump to backup sql data in Python

mysqlbackup.py

from configparser import ConfigParser

def backup_mysql():
        config = ConfigParser()
        config.read("/etc/sysconfig/mysqldump")
        config = config['mysqldump']

        mysql_dump = ['mysqldump',
                '--user=%(username)s' % config,
                '--password=%(password)s' % config,
                '--all-databases',
                '--log-error=%(errorfile)s' % config ]

        with open(config['backupfile'], "wb") as sqldata:
                proc = subprocess.Popen(mysql_dump, stdout=sqldata, stderr=sys.stderr)
                ret = proc.wait()
                if ret is not None:
                        print("mysqldump exited with %d" % ret)

Note that /etc/sysconfig/mysqldump needs to contain a series of variables (no quote marks) for username, password, errorfile and backupfile.