How to properly handle empty data set with python mysql connector?

What about:

if cur.rowcount:
    cur.fetchall()
else:
    #whatever you want to do

It's been a while to this question but I'll post the solution I found anyway.

Using the official mysql connector for python, the rows are not fetched from the server until requested. As a result, if there are remaining rows, trying to close the connection throws an exception. One option is to use buffered cursor. A buffered cursor reads all rows from the server and the cursor can be closed at any point. However, this method comes with a memory cost.

There is a hard limit of one open cursor per connection for the mysql connector. Trying to open another cursor raised an exception.

I use this logic for dealing with empty SQL's:

import MySQLdb
cursor = db.cursor()
sql = "SELECT * FROM foobar"
dta = cursor.execute(sql)
if dta == 0:
    print "0 MySQL Entries found"
    cursor.close()

assuming I understood your question correctly, you can't close the cursor for w/e reason. You can "re-position" the cursor without closing it by simply re-assigning the cursor:

cursor = db.cursor()
doStuff()