Note: This term has other meanings in other contexts. Here, we are defining it in the context of a distributed database.
In the context of databases, a driver is a piece of code that you add to your app to help it speak the language necessary for communicating with the database, such as SQL. For example, if you’re building a Python app, you might use the psycopg2 driver to enable it to communicate with CockroachDB using SQL.