gevent has utilities to turn Python blocking calls into non-blocking ones.

In your case you could switch to a pure Python MySQL driver and gevent will turn all your mySQL calls into async.

Actually there're also gevent non-blocking MySQL drivers that are written in C.

>Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about.

That's what friendster thought too.

Friendster became very popular but couldn't handle the scalability part and ended up dying a slow and painful death...