Switching from SQLite to MySQL with Flask SQLAlchemy

I have a site that I've built with Flask SQLAlchemy and SQLite, and need to switch to MySQL. I have migrated the database itself and have it running under MySQL, but

1. Can't figure out how to connect to the MySQL database (that is, what the SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI should be) and


2. Am unclear if any of my existing SQLAlchemy SQLite code will work with MySQL.

I suspect that (1) is fairly simple and just a matter of being shown how to map, for example, the contents of the connection dialog I use in my MySQL database tool to an appropriately formatted URL. But I'm worried about (2), I had assumed that SQLAlchemy provided an abstraction layer so that simple SQLAlchemy code such as

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:////tmp/test.db'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)


class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    username = db.Column(db.String(80), unique=True)
    email = db.Column(db.String(120), unique=True)

    def __init__(self, username, email):
        self.username = username
        self.email = email

    def __repr__(self):
        return '<User %r>' % self.username

admin = User('admin', 'admin@example.com')

db.session.add(admin)

User.query.all()

User.query.filter_by(username='admin').first()

wold work without any modifications other than an appropriate change to the database URI; but the examples I've found for using SQLAlchemy with MySQL seem to use a completely different API.

Can I (2) migrate my Flask SQLAlchemy code to work with a MySQL database by simply changing the database URI and if so (1) what should that URI be?