Brian Hulette created BEAM-14211:
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Summary: Add "interactive" DataFrame operations that eagerly
trigger execution
Key: BEAM-14211
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-14211
Project: Beam
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: dsl-dataframe
Reporter: Brian Hulette
The DataFrame API is completely deferred by design, it means users can quickly
build up a pipeline of operations and explicitly execute it when they want to.
However the pandas library is designed for eager execution on in-memory
datasets, so many operations that users are accustomed to using in pandas are
difficult or impossible to implement in a deferred context.
We should consider adding a set of "interactive" tools that are eagerly
executed through tight integration with Interactive Beam (i.e. they call
ib.collect() internally). All non-deferred-result, non-deferred-columns, and
plotting operations (see [coverage
status|https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hHAaJ0n0k2tw465ORs5tfdy4Lg0DnGWIQ53cLjAhel0/edit])
could be included in this set.
We need to make sure that these tools are easily distinguishable from standard,
deferred operations. It's important that users are not surprised when these
operations trigger execution. I won't prescribe a detailed design here yet, but
some approaches to consider:
- All such operations are defined in a particular namespace ("interactive",
"eager", "collect"?), i.e. users would access them as
{{df.interactive.plot()}}, {{df.interactive.to_list()}},
{{df.interactive.pivot()}}.
- When used in a notebook context users should get some opportunity to abort
(an "are you sure?" dialog, a page to enter parameters like project id, ...)
that explains why execution was triggered.
Ideally this feature would not be tightly coupled to notebooks. Users might
want to use these tools in an IPython interpreter, or in a python script (even
plots could make sense in this context, the plot operation should return an
object that the user can use to write the plot to a png).
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