[sagarm]

I've worked on a few SQL systems used for analytics and ETL.

My users fell into (for the purposes of this discussion) three categories:

1. Analysts who prefer sheets

2. Data scientists that prefer pandas

3. Engineers who prefer C++/Java/JavaScript/Python

I'm fairly sure SQL isn't the first choice for any of them, but in all three cases a modern vectorized SQL engine will be the fastest option for expressing and executing many analysis and ETL tasks, especially when the datasets don't fit on a single machine. It's also easier to provide a shared pool of compute to run SQL than arbitrary code, especially with low latency.

Even as a query engine developer, I would prefer using a SQL engine. Performing even the basic optimizations a modern engine would perform -- columnar execution, predicate pushdown, pre-aggregation for shuffles, etc -- would be at least a week of work for me. A bit less if I built up a large library to assist.

[xpe]

Re #2: I prefer https://pola.rs over Pandas

[sagarm]

I've heard great things about Pola.rs performance. To get there, they have a lazy evaluation so they can see more of the computation at once, allowing them to implement optimizations similar to those in a SQL engine.

[xpe]

In the early days, even as I appreciated what Pandas could do, I never found its API sane. Pandas has too many special cases and foot-guns. It is a notorious case of poor design.

My opinion is hardly uncommon. If you read over https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/c3lr9n/am_i_th... you will find many in agreement. Of those who "like" Pandas, it is often only a relative comparison to something worse.

The problems of the Pandas API were not intrinsic nor unavoidable. They were poor design choices probably caused by short-term thinking or a lack of experience.

Polars is a tremendous improvement.

[sagarm]

Hey, I agree with you.

On eager vs lazy evaluation -- pytorch defaulting to eager seemed to be part of the reason it was popular. Adding optional lazy evaluation to improve performance later seems to have worked for them.