Right, that saves me a lot of pain Steve, thankyou. I'm sure Microsoft mention this somewhere but they haven't gone out of their way to make it obvious 😉

I have some queries defined in MySQL. I want the results of these queries to be stacked up in a table. It is ETL at a very basic level, I just want to use the last load date in the table as a parameter in the MySQL query.

So, I need to fire queries on a timer based on the the last load date of the current data it holds (and no, I don't even know if I can do that on Azure yet).

Call me a dinosaur but linked servers and ODBC are a really cheap and reliable way to achieve this. Is there something else I could be looking at for doing this?

Basically I've got 2 weeks to build a very quick and dirty data mart that'll feed out to Excel/Power BI and leave them with something I can support remotely, they're a startup so I need to keep the billing to the absolute minimum. I'm already familiar with the data so it's really just the mechanics I'm concerned with at the moment.