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Polars is a blazingly fast DataFrames library implemented in Rust using Apache Arrow Columnar Format as the memory model.

• Lazy | eager execution
• Multi-threaded
• SIMD
• Query optimization
• Powerful expression API
• Hybrid Streaming (larger than RAM datasets)
• Rust | Python | NodeJS | ...

To learn more, read the User Guide.

>>> import polars as pl
>>> df = pl.DataFrame(
...     {
...         "A": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
...         "fruits": ["banana", "banana", "apple", "apple", "banana"],
...         "B": [5, 4, 3, 2, 1],
...         "cars": ["beetle", "audi", "beetle", "beetle", "beetle"],
...     }
... )

# embarrassingly parallel execution & very expressive query language
>>> df.sort("fruits").select(
...     [
...         "fruits",
...         "cars",
...         pl.lit("fruits").alias("literal_string_fruits"),
...         pl.col("B").filter(pl.col("cars") == "beetle").sum(),
...         pl.col("A").filter(pl.col("B") > 2).sum().over("cars").alias("sum_A_by_cars"),
...         pl.col("A").sum().over("fruits").alias("sum_A_by_fruits"),
...         pl.col("A").reverse().over("fruits").alias("rev_A_by_fruits"),
...         pl.col("A").sort_by("B").over("fruits").alias("sort_A_by_B_by_fruits"),
...     ]
... )
shape: (5, 8)
┌──────────┬──────────┬──────────────┬─────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┐
│ fruits   ┆ cars     ┆ literal_stri ┆ B   ┆ sum_A_by_ca ┆ sum_A_by_fr ┆ rev_A_by_fr ┆ sort_A_by_B │
│ ---      ┆ ---      ┆ ng_fruits    ┆ --- ┆ rs          ┆ uits        ┆ uits        ┆ _by_fruits  │
│ str      ┆ str      ┆ ---          ┆ i64 ┆ ---         ┆ ---         ┆ ---         ┆ ---         │
│          ┆          ┆ str          ┆     ┆ i64         ┆ i64         ┆ i64         ┆ i64         │
╞══════════╪══════════╪══════════════╪═════╪═════════════╪═════════════╪═════════════╪═════════════╡
│ "apple"  ┆ "beetle" ┆ "fruits"     ┆ 11  ┆ 4           ┆ 7           ┆ 4           ┆ 4           │
│ "apple"  ┆ "beetle" ┆ "fruits"     ┆ 11  ┆ 4           ┆ 7           ┆ 3           ┆ 3           │
│ "banana" ┆ "beetle" ┆ "fruits"     ┆ 11  ┆ 4           ┆ 8           ┆ 5           ┆ 5           │
│ "banana" ┆ "audi"   ┆ "fruits"     ┆ 11  ┆ 2           ┆ 8           ┆ 2           ┆ 2           │
│ "banana" ┆ "beetle" ┆ "fruits"     ┆ 11  ┆ 4           ┆ 8           ┆ 1           ┆ 1           │
└──────────┴──────────┴──────────────┴─────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┘

Polars is very fast. In fact, it is one of the best performing solutions available. See the results in h2oai's db-benchmark.

In the TPCH benchmarks polars is orders of magnitudes faster than pandas, dask, modin and vaex on full queries (including IO).

Polars is also very lightweight. It comes with zero required dependencies, and this shows in the import times:

• polars: 70ms
• numpy: 104ms
• pandas: 520ms

If you have data that does not fit into memory, polars lazy is able to process your query (or parts of your query) in a streaming fashion, this drastically reduces memory requirements so you might be able to process your 250GB dataset on your laptop. Collect with collect(streaming=True) to run the query streaming. (This might be a little slower, but it is still very fast!)

Install the latest polars version with:

pip install polars

We also have a conda package (conda install polars), however pip is the preferred way to install Polars.

Install Polars with all optional dependencies.

pip install 'polars[all]'
pip install 'polars[numpy,pandas,pyarrow]'  # install a subset of all optional dependencies

You can also install the dependencies directly.

Releases happen quite often (weekly / every few days) at the moment, so updating polars regularly to get the latest bugfixes / features might not be a bad idea.

You can take latest release from crates.io, or if you want to use the latest features / performance improvements point to the master branch of this repo.

polars = { git = "https://github.com/pola-rs/polars", rev = "<optional git tag>" }

Required Rust version >=1.58

Want to contribute? Read our contribution guideline.

If you want a bleeding edge release or maximal performance you should compile polars from source.

This can be done by going through the following steps in sequence:

1. Install the latest Rust compiler
2. Install maturin: pip install maturin
3. Choose any of:
   • Fastest binary, very long compile times:

     $ cd py-polars && maturin develop --release -- -C target-cpu=native

   • Fast binary, Shorter compile times:

     $ cd py-polars && maturin develop --release -- -C codegen-units=16 -C lto=thin -C target-cpu=native

Note that the Rust crate implementing the Python bindings is called py-polars to distinguish from the wrapped Rust crate polars itself. However, both the Python package and the Python module are named polars, so you can pip install polars and import polars.

Polars has transitioned to arrow2. Arrow2 is a faster and safer implementation of the Apache Arrow Columnar Format. Arrow2 also has a more granular code base, helping to reduce the compiler bloat.

See this example.

Do you expect more than 2^32 ~4,2 billion rows? Compile polars with the bigidx feature flag.

Or for python users install pip install polars-u64-idx.

Don't use this unless you hit the row boundary as the default polars is faster and consumes less memory.

Do you want polars to run on an old CPU (e.g. dating from before 2011)? Install pip polars-lts-cpu. This polars project is compiled without avx target features.

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