ADBC
Arrow Database Connectivity
Judgement: Adopt
Arrow-native DB connectivity; the modern replacement for JDBC/ODBC on analytical workloads.
Arrow-native database connectivity API. Where JDBC and ODBC marshal results row-by-row, ADBC moves data as Arrow record batches — zero-copy where possible, dramatically faster for analytical workloads.
Designed to coexist with JDBC and ODBC: drivers can wrap them today, and engines can expose ADBC natively for the columnar fast path.
Why it counts as a standard
ADBC is published as an open API specification under the Apache Arrow project, with drivers contributed by multiple vendors (Snowflake, BigQuery, DuckDB, Postgres, SQLite). The driver interface and the Arrow-batch result contract are the standard surface — like JDBC/ODBC, but columnar.
At a glance
- Category
- Database Connectivity
- Governance
- Apache Software Foundation (Arrow project)
- Status
- Stable; growing driver ecosystem
- First released
- 2023
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Database Connectivity.
See ADBC in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare ADBC against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.