Pandas Should Go Extinct: You Probably Don't Have Big Data

Pandas Should Go Extinct

Eddie argues Pandas should be retired. He crunches Amazon Redshift fleet data: 94.68% of tables are under 100GB, and 86.9% of queries touch ≤80GB. Most teams don't have Big Data—they have Medium Data and don't need Spark. He recommends Polars (a Rust DataFrame library) and DuckDB (an in-memory analytics DB, like SQLite for analytics) as single-machine replacements. The post includes code comparisons and notes painless migration via Apache Arrow. Exact benchmark numbers for Polars vs DuckDB aren't spelled out in the body, but the claim is clear: these tools fill the gap between Pandas' performance cliff and distributed overkill. I'd discount the 1KB/row assumption as optimistic, but even at 10KB the math holds.