ODBC Takes an Arrow to the Knee: ADBC

For decades, ODBC/JDBC have been the standard for row-oriented database access. However, modern OLAP systems tend instead to be column-oriented for performance – leading to significant conversion costs when requesting data from database systems. This is where Arrow Database Connectivity comes in!

ADBC is similar to ODBC/JDBC in that it defines a single API which is implemented by drivers to provide access to different databases. The difference being that ADBC’s API is defined in terms of the Apache Arrow in-memory columnar format. Applications can code to this standard API much like they would for ODBC or JDBC, but fetch result sets in the Arrow format, avoiding transposition and conversion costs if possible..

This talk will cover goals, use-cases, and examples of using ADBC to communicate with different Data APIs (such as Dremio via Flight SQL or postgres) with Arrow Native in-memory data.