snowflakedb / snowflakedb/snowpark-python
SNOW-753219: Add support for "to_arrow" and "from_arrow" methods
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- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 341
- Forks
- 155
- Avg merge
- 4d 16h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 27
Description
What is the current behavior?
Currently the only way to "export" a snowpark dataframe is by converting it to a pandas dataframe. While this is great, newer alternatives are starting to gain traction, so a way to export to them to other libraries than pandas would be good.
Currently you can convert to a pandas dataframe, and then into other types, but a more direct way would be better.
There is already support for fetch_arrow_all in snowflake-connector, which I believe snowpark already uses, and I've tested it to work with Polars.from_arrow().
What is the desired behavior?
Expose an arrow representation of the dataframe so that it can be picked up by f.ex Polars.from_arrow().
Inversely it would be great to be able to do the reverse operation using polars.to_arrow().
How would this improve snowflake-snowpark-python?
This would allow snowpark to be more flexible as Arrow is becoming widely supported in the data space. It would also allow basic support for other libraries without having adding direct support for certain libraries.
References, Other Background
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at the Snowpark DataFrame conversion path and inspect how the existing connector fetch_arrow_all support is used. Compare the desired interoperability with Polars.from_arrow() and polars.to_arrow(); done means exposing both Arrow export and reverse conversion without requiring an intermediate pandas DataFrame.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- data-engineering
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100