Microsoft has heeded this cardinal rule of information science with the latest Community Technology Preview release of SQL Server 2017. Python can now be used within SQL Server to perform analytics, run machine learning models, or handle most any kind of data-powered work.
This integration isn’t limited to enterprise editions of SQL Server 2017, either—it’ll also be available in the free-to-use Express edition.
The most conventional application of Python with SQL Server is to execute Python scripts as normal, with SQL Server as a data source. Microsoft has also made it possible to embed Python code directly in SQL Server databases by including the code as a T-SQL stored procedure. This allows Python code to be deployed in production along with the data it’ll be processing.
These behaviors, and the RevoScalePy package, are essentially Python versions of features Microsoft built for SQL Server back when it integrated the R language into the database. Both Python and R T-SQL code can be used side by side in the same database if needed.
