Python Polars 2.0 release

[u/ritchie46]

Hey all! We just released Polars 2.0.

We are really happy with the results. It removed many of our "legacy decisions" (mistakes), makes the streaming engine our default and promotes SQL to a first class citizen within Polars. We initially said it would be a small ("boring") release, but we managed to sneak in a lot more than anticipated.

It comes with our initial out-of-core (spill to disk) support, a new Map data type and a lot of performance improvements. In fact, we think Polars is now one of the fastest analytical SQL engines on a single node. See benchmarks in the post: https://pola.rs/posts/release-polars-2/

To help you upgrade, we also posted a migration guide: https://docs.pola.rs/releases/upgrade/2/

Disclosure: I am involved with Polars

[u/kvlonge]

Amazing stuff guys! Polars is a stunning project.

Just saw the SQL 'first class citizen' comment as well. That is brilliant news!

[u/Efficient_Shoe_6646]

I love that Rust is taking Data Engineering by swarm. DataFusion and Polars are going to be industry standards pretty soon.

[u/commenterzero → u/Efficient_Shoe_6646]

It can be very.....polarizing

[u/Wojtkie]

Sweeeet!!! I’m stoked. I’ll have to give it a look later today

[u/alt_acc2020]

>out of core support

Yay! Polars’ iceberg lib being broken + lack of spilling made it really hard to pick it over Duckdb for some of our app-layer processing. Really glad to see these in finally :)

[u/zmanvv]

Fantastic work as always, congratulations to you and the team Ritchie!

[u/necrohobo]

I have standardized the use of polars at work, many now see the light.

[u/CrayonUpMyNose]

A loot of tools - and LLM coding assistants - still default to pandas. Is publishing how-to guides and code samples, especially for library developers, the way to overcome this inertia in adoption by having LLM training data scrapers pick them up?

[u/VipeholmsCola → u/CrayonUpMyNose]

If you point any llm to the polars docs they write polars fine 

[u/CrayonUpMyNose → u/VipeholmsCola]

That's understood. The question is how to get to the point where it becomes the default.

[u/VipeholmsCola → u/CrayonUpMyNose]

Its goingto default to the collective knowledge which pandas currently has, because its older. Just tell the LLM to switch to polars and its no problem

[u/imanexpertama → u/VipeholmsCola]

Since when? Genuinely asking, it wasn’t working too good for me 1/2 - 1 year ago and I wonder if that has changed or I went wrong somewhere else.
I felt it especially annoying with differences between versions, the generated code would default to older versions and Claude kept telling me to update

[u/kvothethechandrian → u/imanexpertama]

There is a official polars skill for claude that pulls docs matching your polars version and helps writing better code with polars. Honestly for me it's been a breeze, and the API is much more readable than pandas

[u/wildjackalope → u/imanexpertama]

A lots happened in a year, might be worth another shot. Honestly, I’ll take the LLM friction if I don’t have to deal with Pandas API.

[u/Past_Huckleberry5571 → u/CrayonUpMyNose]

pandas in 2026 omegalul

[u/isaac-harvey]

Wondering how to choose between DuckDB and Polars for SQL processing? Both seem pretty fantastic.

[u/Western_Rub_7236]

And I am already shamelessly using it already to build another product. https://github.com/det-Labs/det[det](https://github.com/det-Labs/det)

[u/espero]

Data frames with Polars or Pandas?