Proper way to construct MySQL queries in python?

After starting with python last week after coming from php I am wondering what is the best way to build a MySQL query.

I am using Python's MySQLdb module.

After doing some research it seems the best way is something similar to the following code below:

def updateEmployee(employee):
  try:
      cursor = db.cursor()
      cursor.execute("""
          UPDATE `employee2` 
          SET `employeeID`=%s, `parentNameN`=%s, `firstName`=%s, `lastName`=%s,     `title`=%s, `room`=%s, `locCode`=%s, `posOrg`=%s
          WHERE  `employee2`.`nameN`=%s 
      """, (employee["employeeID"], employe开发者_JAVA技巧e["parentNameN"], employee["firstName"],     employee["lastName"], employee["title"], employee["room"], employee["locCode"], employee["posOrg"], employee["nameN"]))
      db.commit()
      print employee["nameN"]+" updated"
  except MySQLdb.Error, e:
      print "Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1])
      sys.exit(1)

This is all great except, when this errors I get something such as "Error 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax:..." which is nice, it says my query was syntactically incorrect.

So I got that part, but how can I view the query in question? Is there a way I can construct this query outside of the cursor.execute so that in situations where I get generic error messages I can at least do a "print query"?

---

You don't need backquotes in your query. Mistake is here `posOrg`:%s

SET `employeeID`=%s, `parentNameN`=%s, `firstName`=%s, `lastName`=%s,
 `title`=%s, `room`=%s, `locCode`=%s, **`posOrg`:%s**