Can two programs, written in different languages, connect to the same SQL database?
Yes its possible.
Two applications with different languages using one database is almost exactly the same as one application using several connections to it, so you are probably already doing it. All the possible problems are exactly the same. The database won't even know whether the connections are made from one application or the other.
The question is pretty much in the header, but here are the specifics. For my senior design project we are going to be writing software to control some hardware and display diagnostics info on a web front. To accomplish this, I'm planning to use a combination of Python and nodejs. Theoretically, a python service script will communicate with the hardware via bacnet IP and log diagnostic info in an SQL database. The nodejs JavaScript server code will respond to webfront requests by querying the database and returning the relevant info. I'm pretty new to SQL, so my primary question is.. Is this possible? My second and more abstract questions would be... is this wise? And, is there any obvious advantage to using the same language on both ends, whether that language is Python, Java, or something else?