logoalt Hacker News

jadbox • yesterday at 6:56 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Why use Polars over just postgresql or sqlite?


Replies

cle • yesterday at 7:33 PM

It is optimized for analytic workloads (default in-mem columnar layout), whereas PG and sqlite are OLTP DBs. It's going to be insanely faster for those use cases.

➕ show 1 reply
Tuna-Fish • yesterday at 7:45 PM

Actual databases pay up to two orders of magnitude of speed for durability. If you can regenerate your dataset in case the DB drops it (or there is a power outage, or whatever), being able to complete a complex, write-heavy query in 10s instead of 15 minutes is actually very useful when doing analysis.

entropicdrifter • yesterday at 7:03 PM

Because those are databases? Polars is a data processing engine, not a database. They have different uses.

phillc73 • yesterday at 8:05 PM

If you want to use a database instead of Polars, for similar use cases, duckdb is a much better bet than postgressql or sqlite.