Necesito insertar datos JSON desde tornado a postgres, así que aquí hay una prueba como esta:

from psycopg2 import connect

conn = connect("user='pguser' host='localhost' dbname='pgdb' password='pgpass'")
cursor = conn.cursor()

data = '[{"id":"sdf","name":"wqe","author":"vb"}]'

for row in eval(data):
  print row
  cursor.execute("""INSERT INTO books(id,name,author) VALUES('%s','%s','%s')""" % \
        (row['id'], row['name'], row['author'])
  )

>>> cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM books")
>>> cursor.fetchall()
[('sdf', 'wqe', 'vb')]
>>> 
from psycopg2 import connect

conn = connect("user='pguser' host='localhost' dbname='pgdb' password='pgpass'")
cursor = conn.cursor()

data = '[{"id":"sdf","name":"wqe","author":"vb"}]'

for row in eval(data):
  print row
  cursor.execute("""INSERT INTO books(id,name,author) VALUES('%s','%s','%s')""" % \
        (row['id'], row['name'], row['author'])
  )

>>> cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM books")
>>> cursor.fetchall()
[('sdf', 'wqe', 'vb')]
>>> 
$> psql -d pgdb -U pguser -W
Password for user pguser: 
psql (9.1.6)
Type "help" for help.

pgdb=> select * from books;
 id | name | author 
----+------+--------
(0 rows)
gt; psql -d pgdb -U pguser -W
Password for user pguser: 
psql (9.1.6)
Type "help" for help.

pgdb=> select * from books;
 id | name | author 
----+------+--------
(0 rows)

Como se puede ver después de hacer.select en el shell de python, hay algunos datos, pero en psql hay 0 filas! ¿Qué puedo estar haciendo mal?

Python 2.7.2+