Migrating from Pandas to Polars: A Data Engineering Perspective
After a couple of days of struggling with performance bottlenecks in our UN data processing pipeline, our team made a strategic decision to evaluate modern alternatives to Pandas. What started as a performance optimization project became a complete architectural shift that transformed our data engineering capabilities.
In this post, I’ll share our technical evaluation process, the alternatives we considered, and why Polars emerged as the clear winner for our use case. I’ll also walk you through our migration strategy and the substantial performance gains we achieved.
