Features

The Airport extension brings Arrow Flight support to DuckDB, the features of the extension are detailed below.

Key Features

Supported SQL:

• Databases
  • ATTACH
  • DETACH
• Tables
  • SELECT
  • UPDATE
  • INSERT
  • DELETE
  • CREATE TABLE
  • DROP
  • ALTER TABLE
• Schemas
  • CREATE SCHEMA
  • DROP SCHEMA

Time Travel

Airport supports time travel on tables where supported by the remote system. You can query previous versions of data or audit historical changes using standard SQL idioms.

Custom Scalar Functions (UDFs)

Airport supports custom scalar functions that run on the remote server. These are defined and registered as part of the remote schema and behave like native DuckDB functions.

Table Returning Functions

Airport includes table-valued functions that can receive arguments — including other tables — and return result sets. TVFs enable parameterized queries, dynamic filtering, and subquery pipelines with remote execution.

Developer Features

Open Source and MIT Licensed.

Airport is freely available under the MIT License.

Build on Apache Arrow

Airport uses Apache Arrow and Arrow Flight for:

• High-performance IPC
• Streaming data across process boundaries
• Compatibility with Python, Rust, Go, C++, and more

Easy to Extend

Want to create your own endpoint?

Airport makes it easy to implement custom Arrow Flight servers using DuckDB-compatible semantics. Plug in your data source, expose it with Flight, and let users query it via SQL.

Row and Column Level Security

Airport supports fine-grained access controls, including:

• Row-level filtering based on user or session context
• Column-level redaction or exclusion
• Integration with secret managers and policy engines