Substrait
Judgement: Situational
Cross-engine query-plan IR — pick when you're building or integrating engines that need a portable plan format; end users rarely touch it.
Cross-language, cross-engine specification for representing relational query plans. Where SQL is the query language for humans, Substrait is the serialised intermediate representation engines exchange.
Adopted by DuckDB, Apache DataFusion, Velox, and Ibis (which compiles its DataFrame expressions to Substrait). Aims to be the portable IR between query frontends and execution engines, similar to LLVM IR for compilers.
Why it counts as a standard
Substrait is published as an open specification with protobuf-defined plan types, governed by an independent, ASF-inspired PMC. Multiple independent engines consume and produce Substrait plans, which is exactly the cross-vendor interchange contract that makes it a standard rather than a project.
Why this is listed as niche
Cross-engine query-plan IR that engines exchange — not a surface that users or analysts ever write. Adoption is concentrated inside engine internals (DuckDB, DataFusion, Velox, Ibis); most data teams will never touch it directly. Listed for the engine-builders and Ibis-style frontends.
At a glance
- Category
- Query
- Governance
- Substrait Project (independent; ASF-inspired PMC)
- Status
- Stable; growing adoption across query engines
- First released
- 2021
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Query.
- SQL — Structured Query Language
- GQL — Graph Query Language
- SPARQL — SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language
- MDX — Multidimensional Expressions
See Substrait in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Substrait against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.