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adbc
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Extension descriptor (YAML)

Connects DuckDB to any database that has an Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) driver.

Maintainer(s): columnar-tech

Installing and Loading 

INSTALL adbc FROM community;
LOAD adbc;

Example 

-- Install and load the ADBC extension
INSTALL adbc FROM community;
LOAD adbc;
-- Read from an ADBC database (SQLite) with read_adbc given an ADBC connection profile URI and a SQL query
D SELECT * FROM read_adbc('profile://mydb', 'SELECT * FROM games');
┌───────┬────────────┬─────────────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┐
│  id   │    name    │      inventor       │  year   │ min_age │ min_players │ max_players │ list_price │
│ int64 │  varchar   │       varchar       │ varchar │  int64  │    int64    │    int64    │  varchar   │
├───────┼────────────┼─────────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┤
│     1 │ Monopoly   │ Elizabeth Magie     │ 1903    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 19.99      │
│     2 │ Scrabble   │ Alfred Mosher Butts │ 1938    │       8 │           2 │           4 │ 17.99      │
│     3 │ Clue       │ Anthony E. Pratt    │ 1944    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 9.99       │
│     4 │ Candy Land │ Eleanor Abbott      │ 1948    │       3 │           2 │           4 │ 7.99       │
│     5 │ Risk       │ Albert Lamorisse    │ 1957    │      10 │           2 │           5 │ 29.99      │
└───────┴────────────┴─────────────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┘
-- Create a table function macro to avoid retyping the connection profile URI each time
D CREATE MACRO read_mydb(query) AS TABLE SELECT * FROM read_adbc('profile://mydb', query);
-- Create a persistent connection to the ADBC database via ATTACH
D ATTACH 'profile://mydb' AS mydb (TYPE adbc);
-- Alternatively, ATTACH with a custom delimiter (i.e., SELECT * FROM [schema].[table] for SQL Server)
D ATTACH 'profile://mydb' AS otherdb (TYPE adbc, DELIMITER '[]');
-- Set the default schema
D USE mydb.main;
-- Display all tables in the attached ADBC database
D SHOW ALL TABLES;
┌──────────┬─────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┬───────────┐
│ database │ schema  │  name   │         column_names          │          column_types          │ temporary │
│ varchar  │ varchar │ varchar │           varchar[]           │           varchar[]            │  boolean  │
├──────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┼───────────┤
│ mydb     │ main    │ games   │ [id, name, inventor, year,    │ [BIGINT, VARCHAR, VARCHAR,     │ false     │
│          │         │         │  min_age, min_players,        │  VARCHAR, BIGINT, BIGINT,      │           │
│          │         │         │  max_players, list_price]     │  BIGINT, VARCHAR]              │           │
└──────────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴───────────┘
-- Read directly from the attached ADBC table (no projection or predicate pushdown, use read_adbc for that)
D SELECT * FROM games;
┌───────┬────────────┬─────────────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┐
│  id   │    name    │      inventor       │  year   │ min_age │ min_players │ max_players │ list_price │
│ int64 │  varchar   │       varchar       │ varchar │  int64  │    int64    │    int64    │  varchar   │
├───────┼────────────┼─────────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┤
│     1 │ Monopoly   │ Elizabeth Magie     │ 1903    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 19.99      │
│     2 │ Scrabble   │ Alfred Mosher Butts │ 1938    │       8 │           2 │           4 │ 17.99      │
│     3 │ Clue       │ Anthony E. Pratt    │ 1944    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 9.99       │
│     4 │ Candy Land │ Eleanor Abbott      │ 1948    │       3 │           2 │           4 │ 7.99       │
│     5 │ Risk       │ Albert Lamorisse    │ 1957    │      10 │           2 │           5 │ 29.99      │
└───────┴────────────┴─────────────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┘
-- Insert into the ADBC database
D INSERT INTO games (SELECT 6, 'Battleship', 'Clifford Von Wickler', 1931, 7, 2, 2, 12.99);
D SELECT * FROM games;
┌───────┬────────────┬──────────────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┐
│  id   │    name    │       inventor       │  year   │ min_age │ min_players │ max_players │ list_price │
│ int64 │  varchar   │       varchar        │ varchar │  int64  │    int64    │    int64    │  varchar   │
├───────┼────────────┼──────────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┤
│     1 │ Monopoly   │ Elizabeth Magie      │ 1903    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 19.99      │
│     2 │ Scrabble   │ Alfred Mosher Butts  │ 1938    │       8 │           2 │           4 │ 17.99      │
│     3 │ Clue       │ Anthony E. Pratt     │ 1944    │       8 │           2 │           6 │ 9.99       │
│     4 │ Candy Land │ Eleanor Abbott       │ 1948    │       3 │           2 │           4 │ 7.99       │
│     5 │ Risk       │ Albert Lamorisse     │ 1957    │      10 │           2 │           5 │ 29.99      │
│     6 │ Battleship │ Clifford Von Wickler │ 1931    │       7 │           2 │           2 │ 12.99      │
└───────┴────────────┴──────────────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┘
-- Create a local table in DuckDB of the inventors of each game
D CREATE TABLE memory.inventors AS (SELECT id, inventor FROM games);
-- Create a new table in the attached ADBC database (SQLite) of the inventors
D CREATE TABLE game_inventors(id, inventor) AS (SELECT * FROM memory.inventors);
D SELECT * FROM game_inventors;
┌───────┬──────────────────────┐
│  id   │       inventor       │
│ int64 │       varchar        │
├───────┼──────────────────────┤
│     1 │ Elizabeth Magie      │
│     2 │ Alfred Mosher Butts  │
│     3 │ Anthony E. Pratt     │
│     4 │ Eleanor Abbott       │
│     5 │ Albert Lamorisse     │
│     6 │ Clifford Von Wickler │
└───────┴──────────────────────┘
-- Execute arbitrary DDL via adbc_execute
D CALL adbc_execute('profile://mydb', 'DROP TABLE games');
┌─────────┐
│ Success │
│ boolean │
├─────────┤
│ true    │
└─────────┘
-- Clear local metadata cache after remote schema changes
D CALL adbc_clear_cache();

About adbc

Use DuckDB (v1.4.5+ or v1.5.4+) to query Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or any other system with an ADBC driver. ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) is a universal data-access API built on Apache Arrow, an efficient, columnar data format that almost every data system supports natively. By building on Arrow, ADBC enables:

  1. Lightning-fast (zero-copy) data transfer between column-oriented analytical databases, bypassing the slow column-to-row and row-to-column conversions typical of legacy row-based APIs like ODBC or JDBC.
  2. Seamless interoperability with a large and growing ecosystem of Arrow-compatible systems.

    Key Capabilities

    • Supports catalog lookups, SELECT, INSERT, COPY, and CREATE TABLE AS (CTAS) statements directly on attached databases.
    • Supports custom delimiters with ATTACH (e.g., DELIMITER '[]') to support systems with different table/schema delimiters.
    • Supports built-in connection pooling for each attached database (tunable with adbc_connection_pool_size)
    • Support streaming bulk ingest for INSERT, COPY, and CTAS statements, keeping memory usage low even for data sets that exceed main memory (tunable with adbc_insert_buffer_size).

      Known Limitations

    • Operates exclusively in Autocommit Mode.
    • Predicate and projection pushdowns are not automatically performed for attached tables; use direct read_adbc() queries to push projections and predicates to remote ADBC databases.
    • Concurrent ADBC operations within a single process are not supported. Mixing ADBC reads and writes in the same SQL statement is also restricted by default unless explicitly permitted via adbc_mix_reads_writes. For more information see the documentation.

Added Functions

function_name function_type description comment examples
adbc_clear_cache table NULL NULL  
adbc_execute table NULL NULL  
read_adbc table NULL NULL  

Overloaded Functions

This extension does not add any function overloads.

Added Types

This extension does not add any types.

Added Settings

name description input_type scope aliases
adbc_connection_pool_size The number of connections (default 50) to pool (cache) before the catalog creates ephemeral connections to serve requests. BIGINT GLOBAL []
adbc_insert_buffer_size The number of chunks (default 1000) to buffer in memory before inserting via ADBC. BIGINT GLOBAL []
adbc_materialize_insert_rows Whether input rows for INSERTs are materialized before inserting via ADBC. BOOLEAN GLOBAL []
adbc_mix_reads_writes Whether ADBC reads and writes can be mixed within the same SQL statement (default false). BOOLEAN GLOBAL []