Intro to Ibis: blazing fast analytics with DuckDB, Polars, Snowflake, and more, from the comfort of your Python repl.
Gil Forsyth, Phillip Cloud, Naty Clementi, Jim Crist-Harif
Tabular data is ubiquitous, and pandas has been the de facto tool in Python for analyzing it. However, as data size scales, analysis using pandas may become untenable. Luckily, modern analytical databases (like DuckDB) are able to analyze this same tabular data, but perform orders-of-magnitude faster than pandas, all while using less memory. Many of these systems only provide a SQL interface though; something far different from pandas’ dataframe interface, requiring a rewrite of your analysis code.
This is where Ibis comes in. Ibis is a pure-Python open-source library that provides a dataframe interface to many popular databases and analytics tools (DuckDB, Polars, Snowflake, Spark, etc...). This lets users analyze data using the same consistent API, regardless of which backend they’re using, and without ever having to learn SQL. No more pains rewriting pandas code to something else when you run into performance issues; write your code once using Ibis and run it on any supported backend.
https://ibis-project.org/
https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis
