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databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

columnar.tech

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11–20 of 28 posts

Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#11

Post by ifh-hn »

This is excellent! I'm not a data engineer or SRE or whatever other commenters have mentioned. But part of my job is accessing data in various formats from various places, mostly offline. This in gonna be part of my toolset and I can pipe the output into other tools like nushell too.

Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#14

Post by jnewton_dev »

wodenokoto wrote: post #10
aleda145 wrote: post #5

Cool! But as a data engineer I don't know when I would ever use this. Getting data into a centralized place so it can be joined and queried easily is like prio 1 for any data team. I'm sure SREs will really love me doing expensive adhoc queries against production postgres /s I've yet to work in enterprises big enough to have multi cloud data warehouses though, maybe it's more useful in that setting?

Isn’t it useful for when you are getting things into a central DW? E.g, you don’t need a million tools to connect to the million different application databases when inspecting sources as part of setting up pipelines.

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Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#15

Post by data_ders »

wodenokoto wrote: post #12

My biggest pain point with using different cli to connect to different databases is that they all do things like listing tables differently. Another nice feature one would want from such a program is of course auto complete.

Yeah for me standardization is the big win. But not just output formatting but cli commands and a guarantee that they’re as past as possible given that all the connectors use ADBC

Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#16

Post by data_ders »

whinvik wrote: post #2

Sorry, just trying to understand. Why would I use this over duckdb. duckdb already has plugins for a lot of databases. Is the syntax the advantage?

I think the advantage is simplicity. Why connect first to duckdb and attach the db when you can query it directly with ADBC which is guaranteed to be fast

Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#18

Post by f311a »

data_ders wrote: post #16
whinvik wrote: post #2

Sorry, just trying to understand. Why would I use this over duckdb. duckdb already has plugins for a lot of databases. Is the syntax the advantage?

I think the advantage is simplicity. Why connect first to duckdb and attach the db when you can query it directly with ADBC which is guaranteed to be fast

You don’t need to connect to duckdb, it’s just a process that you spawn.

Re: databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver

#19

Post by freakynit »

whinvik wrote: post #2

Sorry, just trying to understand. Why would I use this over duckdb. duckdb already has plugins for a lot of databases. Is the syntax the advantage?

It's more of a common database cli/shell which uses a well defined, and fast, ADBC protocol. You are basically freed from DuckDB's internal handling/runtime of query for various databases. Not to mention, this has vastly more supported databases.

With databow, the query still runs on the target database (unline duckdb), but you get one consistent CLI across different databases: connection profiles, output formats, history, scripting, and import/export behavior.

This is genuinely useful for humans (For example, I regularly juggle 6-7 different database, oltp, olap, search and key-value mixed), and even more useful for AI coding agents, because they don't have to learn and juggle a different CLI and set of flags for every database.

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