FYI, there's no reason to use a backslash to continue things that are already inside parenthesis.  So you could have just wrote:

```python
raise ImportError("MySQLdb was not importable, therefore "
    "MySQLStreamer cannot be used.")
```
This uses the fact that string literals appearing next to each other are concatenated automatically, e.g. `"my name " " is ian"` is the same as `"my name is ian"`.  More generally, you don't need to use backslash for anything that is inside `(`  `[` or `{`.