Reviewing the issues and PRs there provides a clue what to expect as this project matures.
Seems like a columnar version of ODBC, for OLAP instead of OLTP.
Coincidentally, I wrote an article today on how I use it for similar scenarios. It can fetch from S3, multiple databases at once, and so on.
And you get all the benefits of a database when you need to join or postprocess data from multiple sources.
With databow, the query still runs on the target database (unline duckdb), but you get one consistent CLI across different databases: connection profiles, output formats, history, scripting, and import/export behavior.
This is genuinely useful for humans (For example, I regularly juggle 6-7 different database, oltp, olap, search and key-value mixed), and even more useful for AI coding agents, because they don't have to learn and juggle a different CLI and set of flags for every database.
I’ll still check this out though.
Another nice feature one would want from such a program is of course auto complete.
I'm sure SREs will really love me doing expensive adhoc queries against production postgres /s
I've yet to work in enterprises big enough to have multi cloud data warehouses though, maybe it's more useful in that setting?
E.g, you don’t need a million tools to connect to the million different application databases when inspecting sources as part of setting up pipelines.