Robert Sheldon continues his Python in Machine Learning Services series:
One of the most useful modules is the matplotlib library, which provides an extensive codebase for plotting data and creating rich, customized visualizations. You can use matplotlib components to generate a wide range of graphics, including bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, histograms, and many others. For example, you can generate a series of line charts that aggregate inventory or sales data in your SQL Server database and then save those charts to .png or .pdf files.
This article includes several examples that demonstrate how to create matplotlib visualizations and save them to .pdf files, using data from the AdventureWorks2017 sample database. The article assumes that you know how to use the sp_execute_external_script stored procedure to run Python scripts in SQL Server. If you’re not familiar with the stored procedure, you should review the first two articles in this series before continuing with this one.
If you’re already familiar with matplotlib, using it within SQL Server is pretty easy, as Robert shows. If you’re not familiar, this is a useful introduction to the library.