Python is a general-purpose high-level interpreted language. Because it is a general-purpose language, it is probably even more popular than R or T-SQL. Python was created by Guido van Rossum, with the first release in 1991. SQL Server 2016 started to support R. In addition, SQL Server 2016 brought all of the infrastructure needed to support additional languages. Therefore, it was easy for SQL Server 2017 to add support for Python. In the future, SQL Server might support even more programming languages. I will explain the SQL Server infrastructure later in this chapter. Anyway, it is now up to you to select your language of preference for data science projects.Â
One of the most important ideas behind Python was code readability. In Python, white spaces are used to delimit code blocks instead of special characters, and indents are very important...