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Connect DuckDB to any database that has an ADBC driver

Details

External ID
48836139
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
database
Website domain
github.com
Launched
July 8, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
7
Upvotes percentile
0.3972520908004779
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hi everyone,I'm a PhD student in databases at CMU. Over the past few months, I've been interning at Columnar and building a community extension for DuckDB that lets you query Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and any other system with an ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) driver.The extension supports querying ADBC databases directly through a read_adbc table function. It also supports using ATTACH to connect to an ADBC database and then running SELECT, INSERT, COPY, and CTAS statements as if the database were local to DuckDB.You can install it from DuckDB by running: INSTALL adbc FROM community; LOAD adbc;The ADBC extension is open source and available under the Apache-2.0 License. We plan to contribute this extension to the Arrow project so it can become an official ADBC library.Give it a try, and leave feedback if you have ideas about how to make it better. Leave an issue on the GitHub repo if you hit any rough edges!

Enrichment

Theme
database infrastructure and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
database connector for duckdb
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Writing a native database extension bridging DuckDB's internal vectorized execution engine with the Apache Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) C API requires deep systems programming and database internals expertise.

What it would actually take: Implementation requires C++ systems programming against DuckDB's internal C++ Extension API and the Apache Arrow ADBC C interface. The developer must build zero-copy data translation between DuckDB's vectorized data chunks and Arrow record batches, handle catalog inspection, push down filters/projections across disparate database backends, and maintain multi-platform binary compilation and packaging pipelines.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: LakeSail, Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery

Feature requests: ADBC-enabled connections with DuckDB

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 77 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #45 of 78 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 252 days after the earliest competitor.

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