Arrow has several other related projects in this space:

Arrow Flight SQL defines defines a full protocol designed to support JDBC/ODBC-like APIs but using columnar, Arrow data transfer for performance (why take your data and transpose it twice?)

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/02/16/introducing-arrow-f...

There's an Apache-licensed JDBC driver that talks the Flight SQL protocol (i.e. it's a driver for _any_ server that implements the protocol): https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/11/01/arrow-flight-sql-jd...

(There's also an ODBC driver, but at the moment it's GPL - the developers are working on upstreaming it and rewriting the GPL bits. And yes, this means that you're still transposing your data, but it turns out that transferring your data in columnar format can still be faster - see https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol10/p1022-muehleisen.pdf)

There's an experiment to put Flight SQL in front of PostgreSQL: https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2023/09/13/flight-sql-postgres...

There's also ADBC; where Flight SQL is a generic protocol (akin to TDS or how many projects implement the PostgreSQL wire protocol), ADBC is a generic API (akin to JDBC/ODBC in that it abstracts the protocol layer/database, but it again uses Arrow data): https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2023/01/05/introducing-arrow-a...