Daft is a distributed query engine designed for large-scale data processing using Python or SQL, built with Rust. It offers a familiar interactive API, powerful query optimization, and seamless integration with data catalogs and multimodal types, making it suitable for complex data operations in cloud environments. Daft supports interactive and distributed computing, allowing users to efficiently handle diverse data types and perform operations across large clusters.
The article discusses the comparison between DuckDB and Polars, emphasizing that choosing between them depends on the specific context and requirements of the task at hand. It highlights DuckDB as an analytical database focused on SQL queries, while Polars is presented as a fast data manipulation library designed for data processing, akin to Pandas. Ultimately, the author argues that there is no definitive "better" option, and the choice should be driven by the problem being solved.