Spark has a jdbc format reader you can use.
launch a scala shell to confirm your MS SQL Server driver is in your classpath
example
Class.forName("com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver")
If driver class isn't showing make sure you place the jar on an edge node and include it in your classpath where you initialize your session
example
bin/spark-shell --driver-class-path postgresql-9.4.1207.jar --jars postgresql-9.4.1207.jar
Connect to your MS SQL Server via Spark jdbc
example via spark python
# option1
jdbcDF = spark.read \
.format("jdbc") \
.option("url", "jdbc:postgresql:dbserver") \
.option("dbtable", "schema.tablename") \
.option("user", "username") \
.option("password", "password") \
.load()
# option2
jdbcDF2 = spark.read \
.jdbc("jdbc:postgresql:dbserver", "schema.tablename",
properties={"user": "username", "password": "password"})
specifics and additional ways to compile connection strings can be found here
https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-data-sources-jdbc.html
you mentioned jupyter ... if you still cannot get the above to work try setting some env vars via this post (cannot confirm if this works though)
https://medium.com/@thucnc/pyspark-in-jupyter-notebook-working-with-dataframe-jdbc-data-sources-6f3d39300bf6
at the end of the day all you really need is the driver class placed on an edge node (client where you launch spark) and append it to your classpath then make the connection and parallelize your dataframe to scale performance since jdbc from rdbms reads data as single thread hence 1 partition