I should have read this earlier. I found pyodbc and managed to install the driver to make it work, but I will bear pymssql in mind for future projects. I will have a look at your other posts around this topic as there is always something to learn.
I am impressed at the speed of HiveSQL queries. I used Beem for other stuff and it takes a while. I may see if SQL is a better option for that.
Yes HiveSQL is a lot faster. I haven't had any issues with pymssql yet. Implementation of both is similar too, so it wouldn't take much time to switch from pyodbc to pymssql if you ever will need to.