nowfound

Alternatives

Products that do what ADBC for COBOL – modern database access meets 1959 does

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

  1. 1CD

    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

  2. 2DO

    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

  3. 3
    Nabubit203

    Your database design copilot

    2024

  4. 4HO

    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

  5. 5
    FluentDB275

    The AI database client for Mac

    Jul 2026 · fluentdb.ai

  6. 6CR

    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

  7. 7OD

    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

  8. 8HA

    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

  9. 9IO
  10. 10II

    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

  11. 11SC

    Hello HN! I built stanchion to scratch my own itch. I have personal applications running on SQLite where I want to store log and metric data (basically forever) but don't want to add complexity by bringing in a new database or whole separate server. Some of these applications are running on a Raspberry Pi, where storage and compute are limited, but I still want data warehouse like capabilities. I envision stanchion being used in similar scenarios: on phones and resource-limited devices in applications that are already using SQLite. I know that there are alternatives like DuckDB (which is…

    2024 · github.com

  12. 12
    StationDB100

    Launch your instant admin panel online in a few clicks

    2022

  13. 13
    Cogram132

    Query databases in plain English

    2022

  14. 14

    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.

    12d ago · github.com

  15. 15PA

    2024 · github.com

  16. 16RA
  17. 17
    Hydra116

    Query Postgres, route to any database

    2022

  18. 18TT

    Hi, my name is Anguel and I am one of the developers of WhoDB (https://github.com/clidey/whodb) I am not a fan of the dbeaver, beekeeper, adminer, etc experience because they are bloated, ugly, and at best okay but not great. Hence why I started working on WhoDB. The approach: - browser-based (chrome/firefox) - no bloat - jupyter notebook-like experience (Scratchpad) - built-in AI co-pilot with ollama (local) or openai/anthropic We just shipped query history and replay (time travel?) to the Scratchpad. Would love for you to check it out and give some feedback…

    2025

  19. 19PA

    Howdy! I'm a recent PHP convert after a decade of laughing at PHP memes on r/programmerhumor, and wanted to dive a bit deeper into the language by building something practical with it. I also love beer and decided to combine the two by building a PHP library for the Open Brewery DB API (https://openbrewerydb.org/). Hope someone finds it useful!

    2024 · github.com

  20. 20AN

    We’re building an open-source language layer on top of Go, designed specifically for COBOL-style workloads: Native decimal arithmetic (COBOL-accurate) Record structures and copybook compatibility Batch jobs and transactional orchestration as first-class constructs Sequential / indexed file I/O baked into the runtime Compiles through Go for speed, concurrency, and cloud deployability Think of it as Kotlin for COBOL, or “COBOL on Go” familiar to mainframe engineers, powerful for modern developers. Test Results so far: NIST COBOL-85 validation: 77.61% overall (305/393 tests) NC…

    Nov 2025 · github.com

  21. 21TA

    Hi community, we just released https://github.com/tonbo-io/typed-arrow. When working with arrow-rs, we noticed that schemas are declared at runtime. This often leads to runtime errors and makes development less safe. typed-arrow takes a different approach: - Schemas are declared at compile time with Rust’s type system. - This eliminates runtime schema errors. - And introduces no runtime overhead — everything is checked and generated by the compiler. If you’ve run into Arrow runtime schema issues, and your schema is stable (not defined or switched at runtime), this project…

    2025 · github.com

  22. 22SU

    Hey HN! Vinesh, Ian, and Kunal here. We’re building Bracket (YC W22), a bidirectional ETL platform — software that syncs data two ways between your data stack and the spreadsheet tools that your business teams rely on (e.g. Google Sheets, Airtable, and Notion databases), with the ability to add transformation logic (like SQL statements or MongoDB aggregation statements) in between. (https://www.usebracket.com/) In other words, if you want to join columns from two Postgres tables, sync the result to an Airtable table, and allow your Airtable users to edit certain fields from…

    2022 · usebracket.com

  23. 23GR

    Hi, I'm Philip Moore - the founder of GizmoData, and creator of GizmoSQL - an Apache Arrow Flight SQL Server - with DuckDB (or SQLite) back-end execution engines. GizmoSQL is a composable SQL server with Arrow Flight SQL, DuckDB, and SQLite - with the intention of making it easy to run DuckDB (or SQLite) as a server - usable by multiple people from a client (remote) computer. It also adds security (authentication) and encryption of traffic with TLS. To run GizmoSQL - see the steps in the README.md - where you can see how easy it is to run the server as well as how to connect via ADBC and…

    2025 · github.com

  24. 24MS

    Hello HN! We're excited to announce MyDuck Server, an open-source project that seamlessly integrates the analytical power of DuckDB with your existing MySQL & Postgres databases. *Backstory* Currently, there are no fully satisfactory open-source OLAP solutions for MySQL & Postgres. In the MySQL ecosystem, HeatWave offers close integration, but it's a proprietary, commercial product from Oracle. The Postgres community has seen promising DuckDB-based extensions emerge, including the official pg_duckdb. However, extensions can introduce isolation concerns in mission-critical environments.…

    2024 · github.com

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →