I do expect this package to make connecting easier, but it was okay even before. ODBC connectivity via pyodbc has always worked quite well and it wasn't really any different when compared to any other ODBC source. I'm more on the data engineering side and I'm very picky about this kind of stuff, I don't expect the average user would even notice besides the initial pain of configuring ODBC from scratch.

IIRC, I had trouble if I installed the MS ODBC driver and some of the updates for Ubuntu (WSL) out of order. I generally prefer a language driver package where available.

Would be nice if MS and Deno could figure things out to get SQL working in Deno.

I have very limited Python experience but I remember using pymssql in the past. Are there any problems with it?

We used it heavily 10 years ago. It was okay, but it had a rocky history. For a long time it seemed abandoned, then Python 3 happened and we had to patch our own version for a while. Then a new maintainer took over and stuff would just break or APIs rewritten between versions. We ran our own pypi instance to deal with pymssql specifically.

In the later years it became rather good though and with Python 3 many of the issues with character encoding went away.

I use it on Windows (and Linux) but can't get it to work on M1 chips.

iirc it had problems with named instances - only on some newer version of sql server