What is Flight SQL?

We’ve talked about Arrow Flight a lot in this chapter so far and learned how to create a simple Flight client and server. But Arrow Flight is a framework for building RPC protocols. So, what kind of protocols can be built with it? Well, how about a generalized protocol for interacting with databases? Most systems that interact with databases will leverage the ODBC or JDBC protocols, which have been around for a very long time. Let’s quickly cover what those are. ODBC and JDBC were created in 1992 and 1997, respectively, as a technology to help databases expose a common API. By creating a common abstraction layer that all database vendors could implement a driver for, application developers could simply build code to use this common interface with databases. They wouldn’t have to create custom/bespoke objects for all the different database software they wanted to use. These technologies quickly became the de facto standard in the enterprise world...