Even within the Arrow project, there's still room for drivers just because not every vendor is going to implement the same wire protocol (at least on a feasible timeline). Hence both "ADBC" [1] and Flight SQL [2] (note: NOT a SQL dialect, it is a wire protocol) coexist in complementary niches.

[1]: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/ADBC.html [2]: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/FlightSql.html