Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available

Having done a bit of data engineering in my day, I'm growing more and more allergic to the DataFrame API (which I used 24/7 for years). From what I've seen over the past ~10 years, 90+% of use cases would be better served by SQL, both from the development perspective as well as debugging, onboarding, sharing, migrating etc.

Give an analyst AWS Athena, DuckDB, Snowflake, whatever, and they won't have to worry about looking up what m6.xlarge is and how it's different from c6g.large.

I agree with this 100%. The creator of duckdb argues that people using pandas are missing out of the 50 years of progress in database research, in the first 5 minutes of his talk here [1].

I've been using Malloy [2], which compiles to SQL (like Typescript compiles to Javascript), so instead of editing a 1000 line SQL script, it's only 18 lines of Malloy.

I'd love to see a blog post comparing a pandas approach to cleaning to an SQL/Malloy approach.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFUZlNQIndo [2] https://www.malloydata.dev/

> The creator of duckdb argues that people using pandas are missing out of the 50 years of progress in database research, in the first 5 minutes of his talk here.

That's pandas. Polars builds on much of the same 50 years of progress in database research by offering a lazy DataFrame API which does query optimization, morsel-based columnar execution, predicate pushdown into file I/O, etc, etc.

Disclaimer: I work for Polars on said query execution.

The DataFrame interface itself is the problem. It's incredibly hard to read, write, debug, and test. Too much work has gone into reducing keystrokes rather than developing a better tool.