ADBC for COBOL
modern database access meets 1959
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I'm one of the core developers of ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity). This started as a joke — what would it take to call ADBC from COBOL? Turns out, not much. COBOL's fixed-layout record tables and Arrow's columnar arrays make a lot of the same bets about how to represent typed values in memory. The post walks through the architecture and what surprised us. Repo with runnable GnuCOBOL demos for SQLite, DuckDB, and Snowflake: https://github.com/columnar-tech/adbc-cobol
HN · launched Apr 1, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views
Niche: database clients and gui tools · 112 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▲ +13% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 112 launches in database clients and gui tools →
Could you build this?
No Bridging modern Apache Arrow columnar data structures with 1950s COBOL record definitions requires deep expertise in legacy binary representations, C/COBOL FFI, and Arrow's internal memory formats.
What it would actually take: This requires implementing native C ABI interop bindings that map COBOL's fixed-layout data descriptions (PIC clauses, packed decimals, comp fields) directly to Apache Arrow C Data Interface structures. It demands deep systems knowledge of COBOL compilers (like GnuCOBOL or IBM Enterprise COBOL), CPU alignment, memory layouts, and the ADBC specification. The required skillset combines rare legacy mainframe runtime expertise with modern low-level columnar analytics engineering.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 36 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #30 of 37 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 147 days after the earliest competitor.
- Connect DuckDB to any database that has an ADBC driver · hn · 2026-07-08 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- LatticeDB · hn · 2026-08-25 · 190 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Bobby Tables · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- A new language for COBOL workloads, built on Go · hn · 2025-11-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Polars 2.0 · ph · 2026-10-07 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- PostgreSQL Migrator · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Typol · hn · 2026-06-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- I implemented a neural network in SQL · hn · 2026-07-13 · 121 upvotes · similarity 0.35
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