I wrote it up a small script using bWAPP as my DB target to give an example of how to connect to a remote MySQL DB, querying a table for a partial expression.  The bWAPP "secret" column does not have a lot of data to query but if you throw in "a", you'll return two rows:

(1, u'A.I.M.', u'6885858486f31043e5839c735d99457f045affd0', u'bwapp-aim@mailinator.com', u'A.I.M. or Authentication Is Missing', None, 1, None, 1)
(2, u'bee', u'6885858486f31043e5839c735d99457f045affd0', u'bwapp-bee@mailinator.com', u'Any bugs?', None, 1, None, 1)

------

import mysql.connector

mydb = mysql.connector.connect(
host="192.168.0.49",
user="root",
passwd="bug",
database="bWAPP"
)
while True:
    table = 'users'
    print
    string = raw_input("[*] Enter search query: ")

    mycursor = mydb.cursor()

    mycursor.execute("SELECT * FROM "+table + " WHERE secret REGEXP '"+string+"'")
    myresult = mycursor.fetchall()

    for x in myresult:
        print(x)