Ginger Grant has a teaser for her upcoming 24 Hours of PASS talk:
The process for using Python in SQL Server is very similar to the previous process of installing R. Microsoft renamed R Services to Machine Learning Services, and now allows both R and Python to be installed, as shown in the screen. Microsoft’s version of Python uses Anaconda, which is an open source analytics platform created by Continuum. This is where Python differs from other open source languages, as Continuum is providing the version of Python as it contains data science components which are not included in the standard distribution of Python. Continuum also sells an enterprise version of Anaconda, with of course more features than come with the free version. It is important to remember the python environment as you will need select the same distribution when running Python code outside of SQL Server.
Read on to see how to install Python support in SQL Server 2017 and for a few links to tools.