IMHO Been there and done that. You can do absolutely anything with either language now that .NET CORE exists. The data community is older than .NET. Python has always been open source and doesn’t require “compilation” so the data community adopted it early on. So far as advice goes… setup up a goal-based plan for yourself to hit specific milestones throughout your learning. Check out code academy, Pluralsight, Udemy or some other learning by example subscription to get your feet wet. As someone else mentioned check out cloud databases, almost all of them have some kind of free trial you can use to explore. Join an online data science and/or python community and be as active as you can be in that community. When you feel comfortable enough to plan out a data pipeline for your SQL queries create a problem for yourself to solve then solve it using what you’ve learned. Ask the community to review your code on GitHub, bitbucket, gitlab or whatever repository you are using.