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by spywaregorilla 662 days ago
What is this exactly?

The front page doesn't make it clear to make what ibis is besides being an alternative to pandas/polars.

3 comments

Check the project’s left nav, https://ibis-project.org/why

I didn’t know either. It’s a python dataframe library/api.

Never heard of ibis before but the front page give a pretty good overview of what it is to me at least. Looks like a dataframes api that can be executed on a variety of backend engines, both distributed and local.

Somewhat analogous to how the pandas api can be used in pyspark via pyspark pandas, but from the api -> implementation direction rather than (pandas) implementation -> api -> implementation maybe?

As far as I can tell, it is an ORM for data engineers. They can write Python code that gets translated to either SQL or some other language understood by the DB engine that actually runs it.
Ibis is not an ORM. It has no opinion of or knowledge about your data model, or relationships between tables and their columns.

Check out SQLAlchemy's ORM (https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/orm/) for what that looks like.