Is it feasible to build async support for a third-party DB (Tibero) using thread-based sync I/O?

[ybjeon01]

Hi, I'm working at a database company called Tibero, and we’re currently evaluating how to enable support for the Rust sqlx ecosystem.

One of our clients is interested in using sqlx with Tibero. Here’s the current situation:

• We don’t have a native Rust driver.
• We provide a C-based ODBC driver, which does not currently support async I/O.
• We also have a Java-based JDBC driver, which is currently being extended with async support — but it's not usable from Rust.

We're considering the following workaround:

• Wrap the blocking ODBC calls in threads to simulate async behavior,
• Support only one async runtime for now, since supporting all three (tokio, async-std, and actix) would likely exceed our current time constraints. We're still confirming with the client which runtime they plan to use.

Our main questions are:

• Is this thread-wrapped sync I/O approach a viable short-term solution for integrating with sqlx?
• Are there known issues or drawbacks we should anticipate?
• According to faq.md it looks like sqlx-cli and query!() is not currently supported for third-party drivers. Is there workaround to support custom drivers with sqlx-cli and query!() macros?
• Are there recommended practices or architectural patterns for implementing a third-party driver in this way?

Thanks for your time and input.