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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to ADBC for COBOL – modern database access meets 1959

I'm one of the core developers of ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity). This started as a joke — what would it take to call ADBC from COBOL? Turns out, not much. COBOL's fixed-layout record tables and Arrow's columnar arrays make a lot of the same bets about how to represent typed values in memory. The post walks through the architecture and what surprised us. Repo with runnable GnuCOBOL demos for SQLite, DuckDB, and Snowflake: https://github.com/columnar-tech/adbc-cobol

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I have been making this Cozo database since half a year ago, and now it is ready for public release. My initial motivation is that I want a graph database. Lightweight and easy to use, like SQLite. Powerful and performant, like Postgres. I found none of the existing solutions good enough. Deciding to roll my own, I need to choose a query language. I am familiar with Cypher but consider it not much of an improvement over CTE in SQL (Cypher is sometimes notationally more convenient, but not more expressive). I like Gremlin but would prefer something more declarative. Experimentations…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2TA
  3. 3
    chdb▲88

    Embedded SQL OLAP engine powered by ClickHouse

    2023 · clickhouse.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi everyone, I'm a PhD student in databases at CMU. Over the past few months, I've been interning at Columnar and building a community extension for DuckDB that lets you query Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and any other system with an ADBC (Arrow Database Connectivity) driver. The extension supports querying ADBC databases directly through a read_adbc table function. It also supports using ATTACH to connect to an ADBC database and then running SELECT, INSERT, COPY, and CTAS statements as if the database were local to DuckDB. You can install it from DuckDB by running:…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs. In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take…

    2025 · drawdb.app · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Nabubit▲203

    Your database design copilot

    2024 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey HN, we want to share HelixDB (https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/), a project a college friend and I are working on. It’s a new database that natively intertwines graph and vector types, without sacrificing performance. It’s written in Rust and our initial focus is on supporting RAG. Here’s a video runthrough: https://screen.studio/share/szgQu3yq. Why a hybrid? Vector databases are useful for similarity queries, while graph databases are useful for relationship queries. Each stores data in a way that’s best for its main type of query (e.g.…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    FluentDB▲275

    The AI database client for Mac

    Jul 2026 · fluentdb.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    This is an evolving toolkit of capabilities helpful for analysing and reverse engineering legacy Cobol code. Currently, the following capabilities are available: - Program / Section-level flowchart generation based on AST (SVG or PNG) - Parse Tree generation (with export to JSON) - Control Flow Tree generation (with export to JSON) - Allows embedding code comments as comment nodes in the graph - The SMOJOL Interpreter (WIP) - Injecting AST and Control Flow into Neo4J - Injecting Cobol data layouts from Data Division into Neo4J (with dependencies like MOVE, COMPUTE, etc.) + export to…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A totally proof-of-concept FoundationDB based network block device backend - dividuum/fdb-nbd

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey all! I released drawDB about a month ago and now it's open source. I hope you find it useful. If you want to check out the app you can go to https://drawdb.vercel.app/ . Thank you:)

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    An extensible, state-of-the-art framework for columnar compression, and the fastest FOSS columnar file format. Formerly at @spiraldb, now an Incubation Stage project at LFAI&Data, part of the Linux Foundation. - vortex-data/vortex

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS). Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many AI-driven applications attempt to combine all of these functionalities by stitching together…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Two weeks ago I was on my babymoon in Corfu, Greece. While in transit, I was overseeing a GSoC intern submit an important feature to my array database library, Xarray-SQL. He added `to_dataset()`, which completed the roundtrip between thinking of array data in a tabular model simultaneously as gridded rasters (the premise of the project is that every Nd array can be mapped to 2d, where orthogonal dims of the Nd array are just primary keys of a tabular representation). We discussed in chat, now that this feature existed, what demos could we make that would prove this data model works? With…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    StationDB▲100

    Launch your instant admin panel online in a few clicks

    2022 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A Go SQL query builder and struct mapper. Contribute to samonzeweb/godb development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17PA

    Hi! I've been a member of HN for fifteen years so today I'm very excited to share Plato. Plato is an Airtable-like interface for your Postgres or MySQL database. It's an admin panel for devs and non-devs alike to manage your DB. We see teams use Plato for customer support, customer success, ops, etc.. We built Plato because we think more people should be able to build and extend internal tools. We thought it was strange that even though low-code is supposed to democratize development, all of the low-code internal tool builders are marketed to engineers! Airtable is a familiar UI that fits…

    2023 · plato.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    We have been using graph DBs more and more at work. I found them painful to work with locally and decided to try and build something better.

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leader in accelerating Postgres® in the enterprise, today announced its acquisition of Splitgraph, an early-stage disruptor that provides a Postgres compatible serverless SQL API for building data driven applications from hundreds of datasources. This move is seen as a mean

    2020 · splitgraph.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20CH

    Hi HN! We're thrilled to share CozoDB v0.6, a monumental update to our FOSS database, which already unifies relational and graph features. With the addition of vector search, CozoDB becomes an even better companion for LLMs like ChatGPT. This release introduces vector search using HNSW indices within Datalog, enabling seamless integration with powerful features such as ad-hoc joins, recursive Datalog, and classical whole-graph algorithms. This update significantly broadens CozoDB's capabilities. Check out the linked release note for an in-depth look at the new features, comparisons to other…

    2023 · docs.cozodb.org · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    An open-source in-memory graph database

    2020 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hello Hacker News. I’m Martin, a graduate student from Prague, and I’ve been working on Coros, a C++ library for task-based parallelism. After spending some time with OpenMP and oneTBB, I wanted to try building a library using modern features from the C++ standard library. I’ve used coroutines for task encapsulation and C++23 expected for exception handling, while trying to maintain good performance. Additionally, I’ve implemented monadic-like behavior to allow easy chaining of tasks, similar to the monadic operations in std::expected. You can check out the project here:…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    In-memory NoSQL database with ACID transactions, Raft consensus, and Redis API - tidwall/summitdb

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24
    Hydra▲116

    Query Postgres, route to any database

    2022 · its alternatives →

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