use standard DBAPI conventions

[hunterowens]

currently, MDS provider uses ProviderDataLoader(user, password, dbname, host, port) to connect to databases (Postgres?)

the more pythonic way to do this would be to accept engine configuration strings (for example, here is how SQLAlchemy does it. low priority issue of course.

[thekaveman]

You're right. It passes those args into sqlalchemy.create_engine, no reason NOT to be more Pythonic and accept other inputs to the __init__