I started using python about 6 months ago as we started using Amazon Web Services to support some of our online sites as well as the traditional onsite SQL servers, Web servers etc.

As a DBA I find it a great language to program in, there is so many modul;es out there to plug in and give you a broad range of functionality without coding it all yourself. Traditionally we used powershell, SSIS, vb, C# and command line programming to achieve all of our automation type work. But have started moving to python for everything.

The boto SDK for AWS is especially good, allowing us to build environments using all the different AWS services from single scripts that utilise custom modules we have created.

I even created a few scripts to automate data replication from our onsite SQL Servers to our AWS RDS MySQL instances and back using python. As the systems have no direct connection we can run the scripts from an intermediary server that can connect to both and do all the work required, hooking into S3 storage.