Other DataFrame libraries
Soon after pandas was developed, it became the de facto DataFrame library in the Python space. Since then, many new DataFrame libraries have been developed in the space, which all aim to address some of the shortcomings of pandas while introducing their own novel design decisions.
Ibis
Ibis is yet another amazing analytics tool created by Wes McKinney, the creator of pandas. At a high level, Ibis is a DataFrame “frontend” that gives you one generic API through which you can query multiple “backends.”
To help understand what that means, it is worth contrasting that with the design approach of pandas. In pandas, the API or “frontend” for a group by and a sum looks like this:
df.groupby("column").agg(result="sum")
From this code snippet, the frontend of pandas defines how the query looks (i.e., for a group-by the operation you must call pd.DataFrame.groupby
). Behind the scenes...