>>What is your target?
>>desktop, web or both?

>Primarily web database application development. I understand the benefit Python has in that it can do desktop based apps as well but that is not my main objective.

(1) Node.js: you learn JavaScript once for client and server
(2) Python: you learn Python for server + JavaScript for client*

* using jQuery for client makes JavaScript learning curve easier in (2 ) than in (1)
From what I see, Python and JavaScript look fairly different.

In both cases, you need to learn additionally:
- a web application framework
- HTML + CSS

myself I would go for a single language, eg node.js

you can also consider FoxInCloud ...