Pipe output from shell command to a python script

You need to read from stdin to retrieve the data in the python script e.g.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

def hello(variable):
    print variable

data = sys.stdin.read()
hello(data)

If all you want to do here is grab some data from a mysql database and then manipulate it with Python I would skip piping it into the script and just use the Python MySql module to do the SQL query.