Server–Client Versioning

The integration between the Airport DuckDB extension and Arrow Flight servers is expected to evolve over time. Versioning changes have already occurred during the development of the extension.

To ensure compatibility, each Arrow Flight RPC request includes a custom gRPC header named airport-user-agent, similar in purpose to the User-Agent header used by web browsers. This header allows servers to determine whether a client is compatible with the expected protocol version.

The current value of this header is airport/20240820. Servers may validate client compatibility by requiring the header value to be lexicographically greater than or equal to a minimum supported version.

To retrieve the current value of the airport-user-agent header from within DuckDB, execute the following query:

SELECT airport_user_agent();