TiDB into Apache Arrow with ADBC
TiDB 7.5, read and written through adbcBridge — the ADBC driver that loads the database's ODBC driver — verified on Linux, macOS arm64 and Windows x64. Everything below is the compatibility matrix's record for this row.
Status
PASS
PASS (TiDB, MySQL wire 8.0.11)
PASS (TiDB v7.5.1, MySQL wire 8.0.11; MySQL Connector/ODBC 26.7.1 with NO_SSPS=1 from {no_ssps} — the 8.4.0-era note that no newer connector is published for Windows is obsolete: dev.mysql.com offers 26.7.1 winx64)
Driver and connection string
- ODBC driver
- MySQL Connector/ODBC 9.4 (MySQL wire)
- Wire
- MySQL wire
- adbcBridge
- 0.1.1 (release)
The connection string the matrix used, as the connection strings reference records it (MySQL wire); {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=14000;Database=test;User=root;{plugin_dir}{no_ssps}
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=14000;Database=test;User=root;")
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 TiDB 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
no quirks; run from the tarball the driver needs PLUGIN_DIR= for the mysql_native_password client plugin TiDB's root account uses
Native ADBC driver, compared
TiDB speaks the MySQL wire protocol, so the ADBC Driver Foundry's native MySQL ADBC driver (0.6.0) can be pointed at it too. On 2026-09-05 the same seven-step ADBC workload (connect, SELECT 1, DDL and inserts and a read, a 1,000-row adbc_ingest, table schema, catalog listing, read back) ran through both:
| Path | Result | First error |
|---|---|---|
| Native ADBC driver | ✓ all seven steps | |
| adbcBridge over ODBC | ✓ all seven steps |
Where the native driver stops it is by design of that driver, not a defect of TiDB; the full table for all 28 wire-compatible databases, with each first error, is in the note.