SQL using ADBC

While using SQLAlchemy to connect to databases is a viable option and has helped users of pandas for many years, a new technology has emerged out of the Apache Arrow project that can help scale your SQL interactions even further. This new technology is called Arrow Database Connectivity, or ADBC for short. Starting in version 2.2, pandas added support for using ADBC drivers to interact with databases.

Using ADBC will offer better performance and type safety when interacting with SQL databases than the aforementioned SQLAlchemy-based approach can. The trade-off is that SQLAlchemy has support for far more databases, so depending on your database, it may be the only option. ADBC maintains a record of its Driver Implementation Status; I would advise looking there first for a stable driver implementation for the database you are using before falling back on SQLAlchemy.

Much like in the previous section, we will use SQLite for our database, given its ease of use to...