Matt Topol, Columnar, on ADBC — Interview with Alexy

Alexy Khrabrov talks with Matt Topol, co-founder of Columnar and PMC member of Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, and the new Apache Magpie, about ADBC, the Arrow-native replacement for ODBC and JDBC that keeps data columnar end to end. They discuss dbc, Columnar's package manager for signed ADBC driver binaries, the ADBC community extension for DuckDB, Spark Connect and Sail returning Arrow natively, dbt building its adapters on ADBC, why agent protocols need a binary channel rather than JSON, and how Apache Magpie's skills help open-source maintainers use AI responsibly.