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Daft: Unified Engine for Data Analytics, Engineering & ML/AI

Daft is a distributed query engine for large-scale data processing using Python or SQL, implemented in Rust.

• Familiar interactive API: Lazy Python Dataframe for rapid and interactive iteration, or SQL for analytical queries
• Focus on the what: Powerful Query Optimizer that rewrites queries to be as efficient as possible
• Data Catalog integrations: Full integration with data catalogs such as Apache Iceberg
• Rich multimodal type-system: Supports multimodal types such as Images, URLs, Tensors and more
• Seamless Interchange: Built on the Apache Arrow In-Memory Format
• Built for the cloud: Record-setting I/O performance for integrations with S3 cloud storage

Table of Contents

• About Daft
• Getting Started
• Benchmarks
• Related Projects
• License

About Daft

Daft was designed with the following principles in mind:

1. Any Data: Beyond the usual strings/numbers/dates, Daft columns can also hold complex or nested multimodal data such as Images, Embeddings and Python objects efficiently with it's Arrow based memory representation. Ingestion and basic transformations of multimodal data is extremely easy and performant in Daft.
2. Interactive Computing: Daft is built for the interactive developer experience through notebooks or REPLs - intelligent caching/query optimizations accelerates your experimentation and data exploration.
3. Distributed Computing: Some workloads can quickly outgrow your local laptop's computational resources - Daft integrates natively with Ray for running dataframes on large clusters of machines with thousands of CPUs/GPUs.

Getting Started

Installation

Install Daft with pip install getdaft.

For more advanced installations (e.g. installing from source or with extra dependencies such as Ray and AWS utilities), please see our Installation Guide

Quickstart

Check out our 10-minute quickstart!

In this example, we load images from an AWS S3 bucket's URLs and resize each image in the dataframe:

import daft

# Load a dataframe from filepaths in an S3 bucket
df = daft.from_glob_path("s3://daft-public-data/laion-sample-images/*")

# 1. Download column of image URLs as a column of bytes
# 2. Decode the column of bytes into a column of images
df = df.with_column("image", df["path"].url.download().image.decode())

# Resize each image into 32x32
df = df.with_column("resized", df["image"].image.resize(32, 32))

df.show(3)

Benchmarks

To see the full benchmarks, detailed setup, and logs, check out our benchmarking page.

More Resources

• 10-minute tour of Daft - learn more about Daft's full range of capabilities including dataloading from URLs, joins, user-defined functions (UDF), groupby, aggregations and more.
• User Guide - take a deep-dive into each topic within Daft
• API Reference - API reference for public classes/functions of Daft

Contributing

To start contributing to Daft, please read CONTRIBUTING.md

Here's a list of good first issues to get yourself warmed up with Daft. Comment in the issue to pick it up, and feel free to ask any questions!

Telemetry

To help improve Daft, we collect non-identifiable data.

To disable this behavior, set the following environment variable: DAFT_ANALYTICS_ENABLED=0

The data that we collect is:

1. Non-identifiable: events are keyed by a session ID which is generated on import of Daft
2. Metadata-only: we do not collect any of our users’ proprietary code or data
3. For development only: we do not buy or sell any user data

Please see our documentation for more details.

Related Projects

Dataframe	Query Optimizer	Multimodal	Distributed	Arrow Backed	Vectorized Execution Engine	Out-of-core
Daft	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pandas	No	Python object	No	optional >= 2.0	Some(Numpy)	No
Polars	Yes	Python object	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Modin	Eagar	Python object	Yes	No	Some(Pandas)	Yes
Pyspark	Yes	No	Yes	Pandas UDF/IO	Pandas UDF	Yes
Dask DF	No	Python object	Yes	No	Some(Pandas)	Yes

Check out our dataframe comparison page for more details!

License

Daft has an Apache 2.0 license - please see the LICENSE file.