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Altibase into Apache Arrow with ADBC

Altibase 7.3.0.1.4 (A+ Edition), read and written through adbcBridge — the ADBC driver that loads the database's ODBC driver — verified on Linux. Everything below is the compatibility matrix's record for this row.

Status

Driver and connection string

ODBC driver

Altibase ODBC (libaltibase_odbc-64bit-ul64.so, native wire)

Wire

native ODBC

adbcBridge

0.1.1 (release)

The connection string the matrix used, as the connection strings reference records it (Databases with their own native protocol and ODBC driver); {drv} is the driver library or its name from odbcinst.ini, and the host, port and credentials are the test server's.

Driver={drv};Server=127.0.0.1;Port=20300;User=sys;Password=manager;NLS_USE=UTF8;

Python

import adbcbridge

# {drv}: the ODBC driver library (path), or its name from odbcinst.ini
conn = adbcbridge.connect(uri="Driver={drv};Server=127.0.0.1;Port=20300;User=sys;Password=manager;NLS_USE=UTF8;")
with conn.cursor() as cur:
    cur.execute("SELECT * FROM my_table")
    table = cur.fetch_arrow_table()      # pyarrow.Table

Polars and pandas

import polars as pl, pandas as pd

df = pl.read_database("SELECT * FROM my_table", connection=conn)   # Polars, Arrow-native
pdf = pd.read_sql("SELECT * FROM my_table", conn)                   # pandas 2.2+, ADBC connection

pip install adbcbridge brings the driver library; the Altibase ODBC driver is installed the way its vendor documents, then named in Driver=. Rust, Go, C# and Java use the same connection string through their ADBC driver managers — see the docs.

What the matrix recorded

first-party driver on 20300, linked against nothing but libc, lifted out of the server image with docker cp (-ul64 is the 8-byte-SQLLEN build unixODBC wants; the -ul32 sibling sits beside it).

What this stack needed

• Server side, altibase/altibase is licence-gated — it ships a 1-byte conf/license and the boot stops at Check License with No valid license present! (ERR-42000), a 90-day trial key being a registration away — so the entry runs the same vendor's free altibase/a_plus_edition, which needs none; it wants MODE=foreground (the image default MODE=init starts a shell and exits) and DB_CHARSET=UTF8 (the default is KO16KSC5601).
• Driver quirks handled: the wide and narrow paths disagree above the BMP — a SQL_C_WCHAR parameter is stored as CESU-8 (héllo 🚀 is 13 bytes, LENGTH() 8) and reading that back narrow yields bytes no UTF-8 decoder accepts, while SQL_C_CHAR in and out round-trips it byte for byte, so both ends stay narrow (wchar_as_utf8 + narrow_params, as Informix); its byte types carry vendor SQL_DATA_TYPE codes outside the ODBC range (BYTE 20001, NIBBLE 20002, VARBYTE 20003, BLOB 30, CLOB 40, VARBIT -100) and, unrecognised, BYTE/VARBYTE/BLOB fall through to the text path and come back hex-encoded, so those three are read as SQL_C_BINARY (as Db2's own SQL_BLOB -98 already is); SQLGetTypeInfo has no SQL_LONGVARCHAR at all and reports CREATE_PARAMS precision — not length — for VARCHAR, so generated ingest DDL got a bare VARCHAR, which in Altibase means VARCHAR(1) and fails the first insert with 22026 Invalid data type length, fixed by naming VARCHAR(32000) (ddl_string_type_name, as Firebird); SQL_IDENTIFIER_QUOTE_CHAR is a blank, so ingest quotes nothing and the server upper-cases what it emits (the entry leaves its own SQL unquoted too, as Ignite's does).
• Types: no BOOLEAN (HY004 Unable to create a column with the specified data type, so bo is SMALLINT → int16), no DOUBLE PRECISION (DOUBLE), no VARBINARY, and DATE *is* the timestamp — microseconds and all, described SQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP — so it carries both d and ts; BYTE, VARBYTE, NIBBLE, BIT and VARBIT accept no bound SQL_C_BINARY parameter at all (22018 Conversion not applicable, 135180), which is why b is a BLOB.
• Its parameter arrays are one round trip and beat the multi-row INSERT 26×, so prefer_param_arrays — the third driver to need it, after maodbc and Vertica's; ingest 30k rows/s multi-row, 778–816k as an array, fetch 2.0–2.3M rows/s

Read next

• Altibase ODBC stores astral characters as CESU-8 on its wide path
• Two ways a Go ODBC program dies before it prints anything