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
ADBC for COBOL – modern database access meets 1959 launched on April 1, 2026 with 6 votes, #1,677 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Modern database connectivity meets 1959. It fits better than it should.
COBOL is not a legacy language. It is a production language. It underpins core systems in banking, insurance, government, and payments—environments where software is expected to outlive not just frameworks, but entire hardware generations. There is more COBOL running today than most people are comfortable thinking about. Meanwhile, the data stack has moved in a very different direction. Columnar memory formats, vectorized execution, and efficient open standards like Apache Arrow and ADBC have made it possible to move analytical data between systems with far less overhead than traditional row-oriented APIs. Most modernization efforts force a choice: preserve the legacy system or adopt modern…from columnar.tech
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