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. Back in Chapter 3, Data Science with Apache Arrow, we also talked about ODBC and JDBC as the standard way to connect to most databases currently. If you haven't guessed yet, that something better I was alluding to there was indeed Arrow Flight! Before we get into it, let's have a quick refresher on what ODBC and JDBC 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, and then the...