Fugue may be an unfamiliar name to those in the Trino ecosystem. It’s another Python tool, a programming model built to enhance interoperability between Python and SQL. On the Python side of things, it’s a wrapper around common tools like pandas and Polars that convert code into SQL for high-performance, large-scale query execution. So why are we talking about it at Trino Fest? Because Fugue recently launched an integration with Trino, enabling you to write Python code that can be converted to SQL to run on a high-powered Trino backend.
Though Trino users are quite familiar with SQL, it does present some challenges. Iterating on a SQL query and improving it can be difficult, and finding ways to optimize or speed things up can be a challenge that requires sophisticated external tools or working on hunches. Testing queries, especially incrementally, has never been super easy, either. Compare that to Python, which does not have those problems, but has issues of its own. Python, especially at scale, is not very performant. So it’s natural to try to take the advantages of both, which is what Fugue is aiming to do.
After that brief intro into Fugue, the rest of the talk consists of technical demos of the many various things that you can do with Fugue. This includes setting a query up, breaking it up into smaller parts, bringing it to pandas, and demonstrating extensions that are built into Fugue. With all of these intermediate steps, it becomes easier to unit test queries before sending them into production, making sure that everything works as expected.
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