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Agreed! It's kind of fascinating that a better standard hasn't emerged yet, but not surprising given that each one is developed in isolation by a different organization.

Definitely a lot of room for improvement. Curious if anyone has thoughts about the best route to getting such a standard / protocol in place: it seems like a lot of stars would have to align, but would be invaluable nonetheless.

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As mentioned by others elsewhere in the thread, Apache Arrow Flight SQL aims to be a standard wire protocol that multiple databases can implement, using a columnar data representation: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/FlightSql.html

However it's early days yet.

Such a nonproprietary protocol would reduce vendor lock-in, hence vendors have no incentive to develop one.

As mentioned under the other "XML" suggestion, dedicated services can be created to serve up the standard even if DB vendors don't cooperate.

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