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

Ouch, CVE party.

It’s going to have a very big hill to climb if it’s playing in a space where duckdb already has a hold. Duck has probably been my favourite technology find in the last few years. Awesome tech.

I’ll still check this out though.

ClickHouse also supports a lot of data sources and has a local mode where you just use a single binary with local-only access.

Coincidentally, I wrote an article today on how I use it for similar scenarios. It can fetch from S3, multiple databases at once, and so on.

And you get all the benefits of a database when you need to join or postprocess data from multiple sources.

https://rushter.com/blog/clickhouse-data-processing/

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

This is my question too

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.

duckdb relies on filter pushdowns that makes the reason harder to spot, but you don’t use sqlite to connect to database via JDBC protocol, are you?

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

I find this to put my psql in a better place as a daily driver. Adding this to ~/.inputrc [1] will allow you to limit search on your entered text. Eg.

select (up arrow)

will loop through your psql history for commands that started with e.g., . The challenging part is in wide tables and or table with large data. Less is awkward usually so using pspg made it less awkward.

I tried also to with help of ai, to write a plugin for sublime that fits my flow. It worked well but I think I'm more used to psql.

[1]

~/.inputrc

$if psql "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward $endif

edit: formatting

As a consultant data engineer (ish), I think it has potential. You're right that any company doing data analytics is gonna be prioritizing a single source of truth and a unified platform, but each one will choose a different set of tools, which I'll have to learn, install, and even teach, for each new client. If I can use this to both explore AND implement stuff for clients regardless of their underlying database, that would be a pretty significant win.

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.