Pandas Should Go Extinct: The Case for DuckDB and Polars

Pandas forces users to adopt distributed systems like Spark or Snowflake long before their data justifies the complexity. Amazon Redshift fleet data shows 94.68% of tables hold under 100GB and 86.9% of queries process 80GB or less — squarely Medium Data. Benchmarks on a 1-billion-row CSV reveal Polars and DuckDB finish in about 5 seconds versus Pandas' 4m28s, using 2x and 19x less memory respectively.