Related Work¶

In the initial proposal, a survey of existing solutions and systems was included, which is partially reproduced below for context, though note the descriptions are only kept up-to-date on a best-effort basis.

Preexisting database client APIs¶

Arrow Flight SQL: A standard building on top of Arrow Flight, defining how to use Flight to talk to databases, retrieve metadata, execute queries, and so on. Provides a single client in C++ and Java language that talks to any database servers implementing the protocol. Models its API surface (though not API design) after JDBC and ODBC.
DBI for R: An R package/ecosystem of packages for database access. Provides a single interface with “backends” for specific databases. While row-oriented, integration with Arrow is under consideration, including a sketch of effectively the same idea as ADBC.
JDBC: A Java library for database access, providing row-based APIs. Provides a single interface with drivers for specific databases.
ODBC: A language-agnostic standard from the ISO/IEC for database access, associated with Microsoft. Feature-wise, it is similar to JDBC (and indeed JDBC can wrap ODBC drivers), but it offers columnar data support through fetching buffers of column values (with some caveats). Provides a single C interface with drivers for specific databases.
PEP 249 (DBAPI 2.0): A Python standard for database access providing row-based APIs. Not a singular package, but rather a set of interfaces that packages implement.

Preexisting libraries¶

These are libraries which either 1) implement columnar data access for a particular system; or 2) could be used to implement such access.

Arrow Flight: An RPC framework optimized for transferring Arrow record batches, with application-specific extension points but without any higher level semantics.
Arrow JDBC: A Java submodule, part of Arrow/Java, that uses the JDBC API to produce Arrow data. Internally, it can read data only row-at-a-time.
arrow-odbc: A Rust community project that uses the ODBC API to produce Arrow data, using ODBC’s buffer-based API to perform bulk copies. (See also: Turbodbc.)
Arrowdantic: Python bindings for an implementation of ODBC<>Arrow in Rust.
pgeon: A client that manually parses the Postgres wire format and produces Arrow data, bypassing JDBC/ODBC. While it attempts to optimize this case, the Postgres wire protocol is still row-oriented.
Turbodbc: A set of Python ODBC bindings, implementing PEP 249, that also provides APIs to fetch data as Arrow batches, optimizing the conversion internally.

Papers¶

Raasveldt, Mark, and Hannes Mühleisen. “Don’t Hold My Data Hostage - A Case for Client Protocol Redesign”. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 1022–1033, 2017.