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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): SamArch27, columnar-tech

Compatibility Matrix

This table covers all DuckDB releases that have not reached end-of-life, including LTS releases, and shows the 2 most recent patch releases of each. Older patch releases are not listed, but the extension may be available for them as well.

Platform 1.4.4 1.4.5 1.5.5 1.5.6 2.0.0
Linux AMD64
Linux ARM64
macOS AMD64
macOS ARM64
Windows AMD64
Windows ARM64
WebAssembly

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 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 pushdowns are not automatically performed for attached tables; use direct read_adbc() queries to push 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 Clears DuckDB's locally cached metadata for attached ADBC databases. Forces catalog and schema information to be fetched from the ADBC database. NULL [CALL adbc_clear_cache();]
adbc_execute table Executes an SQL statement (e.g. DROP TABLE, CREATE INDEX) against a remote ADBC database. NULL [CALL adbc_execute('profile://mydb', 'DROP TABLE games');]
read_adbc table Executes a SQL query against a remote database via an ADBC connection profile URI and returns the result as a DuckDB table. NULL [SELECT * FROM read_adbc('profile://mydb', 'SELECT * FROM games');]

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 typed_value
adbc_connection_pool_size The number of connections (default 50) to pool (cache) before the catalog creates ephemeral connections to serve requests. BIGINT GLOBAL [] 50
adbc_insert_buffer_size The number of chunks (default 1000) to buffer in memory before inserting via ADBC. BIGINT GLOBAL [] 1000
adbc_materialize_insert_rows Whether input rows for INSERTs are materialized before inserting via ADBC. BOOLEAN GLOBAL [] false
adbc_mix_reads_writes Whether ADBC reads and writes can be mixed within the same SQL statement (default false). BOOLEAN GLOBAL [] false
temp_directory Set the directory to which temporary files are written. VARCHAR GLOBAL [] post.db.tmp