Ian Cook

@ian.columnar.tech

I work on Apache Arrow and obsess about interoperability and performance in data analytics systems

AI coding tools speed up how we build data-driven apps. But legacy database access patterns slow us down. Join us for a live hands-on workshop to learn how ADBC makes database access faster, more portable, and better suited to analytical and agentic work. Register on Luma: luma.com/3lt47cj9

Hands-on workshop: Create data-driven apps faster with ADBC and AI · Zoom · Luma

AI coding tools are changing how we build data pipelines and applications, but all of that code still needs to connect to databases, and the connectivity layer…

luma.com

The fastest operation is the one you don’t have to do. When a database natively supports @arrow.apache.org, ADBC can speed up fetching and ingestion by eliminating costly row/column conversions. How much faster is it in practice? We ran some benchmarks to find out. Link below 👇

An abstract hyperspace warp image inspired by the comedic "going plaid" effect from the 1980s cult film "Spaceballs".

This week we shipped the second release of dbc, the command-line tool for installing and managing ADBC drivers: 📦 More drivers (Oracle & Teradata) 🔐 Private registries 🛠️ Easier to embed in other tools 🧑‍💻 Better human UX 🤖 Better agent experience Full details in comments 👇

Terminal-style image showing the command `dbc install` typed in a command line box, with a colorful swirling list of database and data warehouse names in the background, illustrating that dbc can install ADBC drivers for many different systems.

Apache Arrow is 10 years old 🎉 The first git commit landed on 2016-02-05. Now Arrow has 10+ official implementations and a growing third-party ecosystem. Read our celebratory blog post for some tidbits of Arrow history, and our outlook on the present and future. arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/02...

Apache Arrow is 10 years old 🎉

The Apache Arrow project was officially established and had its first git commit on February 5th 2016, and we are therefore enthusiastic to announce its 10-year anniversary! Looking back over these 10...

arrow.apache.org

Fetch query results without ODBC / JDBC bottlenecks. The new ADBC driver for Databricks is now available in early release. Install it with dbc.

At Row Zero we get amazing speeds ingesting data from Snowflake and other databases that can export column-oriented data. But there's a long tail of data stores that we're forced to slow down for, because they only allow row-oriented export. Here's hoping we can change that!

Ian Cook@ian.columnar.tech · 9mo ago

The future of data connectivity is columnar. Today we launched @columnar.tech to accelerate the shift from slow, row-oriented APIs like ODBC and JDBC to >10x faster alternatives powered by @arrow.apache.org. Learn more 👇

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ian Cook (@ian.columnar.tech) will present @columnar.tech's work on Apache Arrow's database connectivity API (ADBC). ADBC is available in modern DBMSs. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

[Future Data] Where We're Going, We Don't Need Rows: Columnar Data Connectivity with ADBC - Carnegie Mellon Database Group

ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) is Apache Arrow’s answer to ODBC and JDBC:... Read More +

db.cs.cmu.edu