vaex VS ballista

Compare vaex vs ballista and see what are their differences.

vaex

Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualization and exploration of big tabular data at a billion rows per second 🚀 (by vaexio)

ballista

Distributed compute platform implemented in Rust, and powered by Apache Arrow. (by ballista-compute)
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vaex ballista
7 20
8,173 2,238
0.4% -
6.0 9.3
20 days ago about 3 years ago
Python Rust
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

vaex

Posts with mentions or reviews of vaex. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-06-03.

ballista

Posts with mentions or reviews of ballista. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-04-16.
  • Ballista: Distributed compute platform implemented in Rust using Apache Arrow.
    1 project | /r/compsci | 11 Jun 2022
  • Open source contributions for a Data Engineer?
    17 projects | /r/dataengineering | 16 Apr 2021
    His newer project, Ballista, was also donated to Apache Arrow. I hope to get the Rust skills to collaborate with him on open source work someday too. He's also doing really cool work on spark-rapids FYI.
  • Best format to use for DataFrames in Rust and Python?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 16 Mar 2021
    https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista/blob/main/rust/executor/src/flight_service.rs#L193-L228
  • I wrote one of the fastest DataFrame libraries
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2021
    I'm guessing Polars and Ballista (https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista) have different goals, but I don't know enough about either to say what those might be. Does anyone know enough about either to explain the differences?
  • Introducing Kamu - World's first global collaborative data pipeline
    3 projects | /r/rust | 12 Mar 2021
    In your article you mention looking for a faster data engine, have you looked at Ballista https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista? It’s pretty young but it uses the Apache Arrow memory model and the maintainer did a bunch of work on Apache Spark I believe.
  • Rust for DE?
    6 projects | /r/dataengineering | 11 Mar 2021
    https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista is also a cool project worth checking out.
  • Julia: A Post-Mortem
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Mar 2021
    It’s mostly a personal favourite, but once Ballista [1] gets a bit more developed, I expect we’ll tear out our Java/Spark pipelines and replace them with that.

    The ML ecosystem in Rust is a bit underdeveloped at the moment, but work is ticking along on packages like Linfa and SmartCore, so maybe it’ll get there? In my field I’m mostly about it’s potential for correct, high-performance data pipelines that are straightforward to write in reasonable time, and hopefully a model-serving framework: I hate that so many of the current tools require annotating and shipping Python when really model-serving shouldn’t really need any Python code.

    [1] https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista

  • Ballista 0.4.0
    1 project | /r/rust | 20 Feb 2021
  • Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2021
    I've looked at this and thought it looked amazing, but also haven't used it for anything. Some thoughts...

    Rust is a blessing and curse. I seems like the obvious choice for data pipelines, but everything big currently exists in Java and the small stuff is in Javascript, Python or R. Maybe this will slowly change, but it's a big ship to turn. I'm hopeful that tools like this and Balista [1] will eventually get things moving.

    Since the Rust community is relatively small, language bindings would be very helpful. Being able to configure pipelines from Java or Typescript(!) would be great.

    Or maybe it's just that this form of computation is too foreign. By the time you need it, the project is so large that it's too late to redesign it to use it. I'm also unclear on how it would handle changing requirements and recomputing new aggregations over old data. Better docs with more convincing examples would be helpful here. The GitHub page showing counting isn't very compelling.

    [1] https://github.com/ballista-compute/ballista

  • ballista-compute/ballista proof-of-concept distributed compute platform primarily implemented in Rust, using Apache Arrow as the memory model.
    1 project | /r/rust | 20 Jan 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing vaex and ballista you can also consider the following projects:

polars - Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust

spark-rapids - Spark RAPIDS plugin - accelerate Apache Spark with GPUs

data.table - R's data.table package extends data.frame:

differential-dataflow - An implementation of differential dataflow using timely dataflow on Rust.

minimal-pandas-api-for-polars - pip install minimal-pandas-api-for-polars

delta-rs - A native Rust library for Delta Lake, with bindings into Python

rust-dataframe - A Rust DataFrame implementation, built on Apache Arrow

dagster - An orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets.

visidata - A terminal spreadsheet multitool for discovering and arranging data

Prefect - The easiest way to build, run, and monitor data pipelines at scale.

umap - Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection

roapi - Create full-fledged APIs for slowly moving datasets without writing a single line of code.