Skip to content

index.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
141 lines (118 loc) · 7.67 KB

index.md

File metadata and controls

141 lines (118 loc) · 7.67 KB
Raw

adbcBridge documentation

adbcBridge is a single C library that turns any ODBC driver on your machine into an Apache Arrow ADBC driver. Point it at a database you already reach through ODBC — Db2, Oracle, SQL Server, SQLite, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Vertica, SAP HANA, or anything else with an ODBC driver — and read the results as Arrow record batches from Python, Rust, C#, Java, Go, R or C, with no per-database code of your own.

Two acronyms show up on every page, so here they are once:

  • ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) — the decades-old C API almost every database ships a driver for. You talk to a driver manager (a small system library), which loads the vendor driver for your database.
  • ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) — a newer C API whose result sets are Apache Arrow columnar batches instead of ODBC's row-at-a-time buffers. ADBC clients exist for many languages.

adbcBridge is the piece in between.

What it is

One shared library — libadbc_driver_odbc.so on Linux, libadbc_driver_odbc.dylib on macOS, libadbc_driver_odbc.dll on Windows — written in plain C11. It exposes the ADBC ABI (Application Binary Interface, the exact function-pointer layout an ADBC client expects) on top, and calls the ODBC driver manager underneath. It is exactly one file. The driver manager and the vendor ODBC drivers are already yours; adbcBridge does not replace them or bundle them.

   Python · Rust · C# · Java · Go · R · C          your application + its ADBC client
                    │  ADBC ABI (1.0.0 / 1.1.0)
                    ▼
        libadbc_driver_odbc.{so,dylib,dll}          adbcBridge — one shared library
                    │  ODBC API
                    ▼
   unixODBC · iODBC · the Windows driver manager     the driver manager (yours)
                    │
                    ▼
   psqlodbc · msodbcsql · Db2 CLI · Oracle · …        the vendor ODBC driver (yours)
                    │
                    ▼
              your database

A SELECT becomes Arrow record batches; parameters, prepared statements, transactions, bulk ingest, and catalog metadata all map onto the ODBC calls underneath. Where a database already has a first-class native ADBC driver (PostgreSQL, SQLite, DuckDB, and others), adbcBridge can hand the whole connection over to it — see Native delegation.

Who it is for

  • You need Arrow-native access to a database that has no native ADBC driver, and you would rather not hand-roll ODBC-to-Arrow conversion.
  • You already have ODBC drivers installed and configured, and want every language's ADBC client to use them.
  • You are building a data tool and want one code path that reaches hundreds of databases instead of one integration per vendor.

You do not need to know ODBC to use adbcBridge — the getting-started pages walk you through installing a driver manager and a driver from scratch — but the reference pages explain what is happening whenever you want to look under the hood.

How it works

  1. Your language's ADBC client (for example adbc_driver_manager in Python) loads libadbc_driver_odbc and calls its ADBC entry point, AdbcDriverInit.
  2. You pass an ODBC connection string as the ADBC uri option, for example Driver=SQLite3;Database=my.db;. adbcBridge hands it to the ODBC driver manager, which loads the vendor driver and connects.
  3. adbcBridge reads each result set through ODBC's block-fetch and column-wise binding calls and builds Arrow record batches, which flow back to your application through the ADBC ABI.

The library is discoverable by name: an install writes a small ADBC driver manifest (odbc.toml) into a directory the ADBC driver manager already searches, so every binding can load it as driver="odbc" with nothing else set. See Connection strings and Options for the details.

Current status

adbcBridge is early software — version 0.1.3, published on GitHub Releases.

Verified as of 2026-09-04 (rows measured on 0.1.0; 0.1.1 changed native delegation only, re-probed on the 14 PostgreSQL-wire rows on 2026-09-05; the 2026-09-15 releases changed PostgreSQL temporal types, Windows array ingest and the psqlodbc session time zone, re-run on 42 Linux rows and then on the 14 PostgreSQL-wire rows that day)
Databases (one workload: types, NULLs, Unicode, parameters, bulk ingest, batched reads, metadata, errors) 53 on Linux, 45 on macOS, 48 on Windows
Language packages five — Python, Rust, C#, Java, Go (R is smoke-tested)
ADBC ABI 1.0.0 and 1.1.0
Release v0.1.3: four prebuilt libraries, four wheels + sdist, crate, NuGet package, jar; on PyPI, crates.io, nuget.org and Maven Central; SHA256SUMS, its GPG signature, build provenance and an SBOM on the release (how to verify)

Each verified database is listed, with the exact driver and any quirks handled, in COMPATIBILITY.md. Reachability is far wider than verification: adbcBridge can talk to anything with an ODBC driver, and the ODBC ecosystem covers a few hundred data sources. What the numbers above count is what has actually been run end to end. See ROADMAP.md for what is planned.

Tip: The three per-operating-system numbers differ because of driver and server availability on each machine, not because the bridge behaves differently. Where a database is missing on one platform it is almost always because, as of 2026-09-04, no obtainable ODBC driver or runnable server exists there.

Which page do I need?

I want to… Page
Install on Linux getting-started/install-linux.md
Install on macOS getting-started/install-macos.md
Install on Windows getting-started/install-windows.md
Run my first query, in any language getting-started/first-query.md
Use it from Python languages/python.md
Use it from Rust languages/rust.md
Use it from C# languages/csharp.md
Use it from Java languages/java.md
Use it from Go languages/go.md
Use it from C languages/c.md
Look up a driver option (adbc.odbc.*) reference/options.md
Write an ODBC connection string reference/connection-strings.md
Understand the Arrow type mapping reference/types.md
Understand a per-driver quirk reference/quirks.md
Understand native delegation how-it-works/delegation.md
Build from source reference/building.md
Use the command line languages/python.md
Use environment variables reference/options.md
Fix an error TROUBLESHOOTING.md
See exactly which databases are verified COMPATIBILITY.md
See what is planned ROADMAP.md
See the upstream bugs this project reported UPSTREAM.md
Contribute community/contributing.md
Read frequently asked questions community/faq.md

License

adbcBridge is Apache-2.0.