Columnar and the ADBC Driver Foundry (columnar.tech)

Columnar, a startup founded by core Apache Arrow contributors and backed by a $4M seed round led by Bessemer, launched tools and collaboration to modernize data connectivity. They released dbc, an open-source CLI and driver installer backed by a global CDN of signed, prebuilt drivers, plus four new ADBC drivers (Amazon Redshift, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Trino). They also announced the ADBC Driver Foundry — an industry collaboration with Databricks, dbt Labs, Improving, Microsoft, Snowflake and the Apache Arrow community — to make it easier to build, test, release and maintain high-quality ADBC drivers. This matters because ADBC is a modern replacement for legacy row-oriented connectors (ODBC, JDBC, Python DB-API) that forces costly column-to-row-to-column conversions. ADBC transports data in Apache Arrow’s binary columnar format, cutting result retrieval times dramatically (many adopters report >90% speedups) and reducing CPU and serialization overhead that matter for real-time analytics, multi-engine query stacks, and AI workloads. The new tooling addresses adoption friction — multi-platform driver distribution, signing/notarization, and simpler installation — and targets performance bottlenecks in everything from BI tools to model-serving pipelines that still rely on JSON-RPC/base64 style transfers. The initiative aims to accelerate broad ADBC adoption and make columnar connectivity the default for modern data and AI stacks.