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vgi-polars

A Polars client for VGI (Vector Gateway Interface). Lets a polars.LazyFrame/polars.DataFrame scan a VGI catalog's tables and call its scalar, table-in-out, and aggregate functions — the same role the VGI DuckDB extension plays for DuckDB, but for Polars, with no DuckDB dependency at all.

This is not a new VGI protocol implementation. It's a thin adapter over vgi-python's existing pure-Python, Arrow-native reference client (vgi.client.Client) — the same wire-protocol code the DuckDB extension speaks — combined with Polars' polars.io.plugins.register_io_source extension point, which was purpose-built for exactly this "external source with pushdown" shape.

Installation

pip install vgi-polars

HTTP-transport support (talking to a VGI worker over http:///https://, and the Orchard remote-secret-provider path) needs an extra:

pip install "vgi-polars[http]"

Subprocess and TCP transports need no extra.

Quick start

import polars as pl
import vgi_polars as vp

with vp.attach("path/to/my-vgi-worker", name="my_catalog") as cat:
    print(cat.schemas())
    print(cat.tables("main"))

    t = cat.table("main", "events")
    print(t.schema)                # polars.Schema, no scan performed
    print(t.scan().filter(pl.col("value") > 90).collect())

    my_fn = cat.scalar_function("main", "my_function")
    df = pl.DataFrame({"a": [1, 2, 3], "b": [10, 20, 30]})
    print(df.with_columns(my_fn(pl.col("a"), pl.col("b")).alias("result")))

attach() auto-detects transport from the location string's scheme — a bare command is a subprocess worker, http:///https:// is HTTP, tcp://host:port is raw Arrow-IPC framing over TCP:

cat = vp.attach("http://localhost:8080", name="my_catalog")

Any VGI worker — written in Python, Rust, Go, Java, or TypeScript — speaks to vgi-polars unchanged; VGI is a cross-language protocol, not a Python-specific one. See vgi-python for reference worker implementations and the protocol documentation.

Live example: earthquakes

No local worker needed — this attaches over HTTPS to a live, public VGI worker serving the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program's rolling 30-day feed as an ordinary table. More live example workers (weather, volcanoes, and others) at query.farm/vgi.

import polars as pl
import vgi_polars as vp

cat = vp.attach("https://vgi-earthquakes.rusty-bb6.workers.dev", name="earthquakes")
recent = cat.table("main", "recent")

print(
    recent.scan()
    .filter(pl.col("mag") >= 5)
    .sort("mag", descending=True)
    .head(8)
    .select("time", pl.col("mag").round(1), "place")
    .collect()
)

shape: (8, 3)
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────┬─────────────────────────────────┐
│ time                        ┆ mag ┆ place                           │
│ ---                         ┆ --- ┆ ---                             │
│ datetime[μs, UTC]           ┆ f64 ┆ str                             │
╞═════════════════════════════╪═════╪═════════════════════════════════╡
│ 2026-08-14 21:58:21.564 UTC ┆ 7.7 ┆ 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia    │
│ 2026-08-10 12:34:28.125 UTC ┆ 7.4 ┆ 5 km S of San José del Palmar,… │
│ …                            ┆ …   ┆ …                               │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────┴─────────────────────────────────┘

The .filter()/.sort()/.head()/.select() chain runs entirely against the LazyFrame .scan() returns — nothing is fetched until .collect(). If the worker declares filter/projection pushdown support, mag >= 5 and the column selection are sent to it to reduce what crosses the wire; either way, the complete original predicate and projection are always re-applied locally after scanning too (see Pushdown is an optimization, never a correctness delegation below), so the result is identical whether or not pushdown happened to work.

Pushdown is an optimization, never a correctness delegation

This is the single design principle vgi-polars won't compromise on, so it's worth stating plainly: a worker's pushdown support is never trusted for correctness, only for performance.

Polars' register_io_source extension point — the mechanism .scan() is built on — does not re-verify a predicate or projection an io_source claims to have applied. An io_source that silently ignores the predicate it's handed still gets every row back, unfiltered, in the final .collect() result; Polars has no fallback check. This was confirmed empirically, not assumed: a register_io_source callback that received a filter and did nothing with it produced unfiltered results with no warning or error anywhere in the pipeline.

VGI workers, meanwhile, are written and tested against the DuckDB extension, which always re-verifies a pushed-down predicate against DuckDB's own query engine — so a worker can declare filter_pushdown/projection_pushdown support and still apply either only approximately (e.g. a worker that pushes an equality filter but silently ignores a range filter it doesn't know how to translate) and never notice, because DuckDB was always going to catch the difference downstream. Polars won't.

Two systems that each individually assume "the other side will catch what I miss" add up to neither side catching anything. So vgi-polars breaks that: every scan always applies the complete, original with_columns selection, predicate, and row-limit truncation locally, after fetching, regardless of what was pushed down or what the worker claims to have handled. A partial or entirely-failed pushdown translation is therefore only ever a performance loss — sending more rows/columns than strictly necessary — never a correctness one.

Status

Implemented:

• Catalog attach/detach with versioning introspection
• Schema and table discovery, incl. per-column statistics
• Table scan (eager + lazy) with best-effort projection/filter pushdown, incl. is_in
• required_filters cost-safety enforcement
• Sequential split-scan redemption
• Transparent multi-branch-table scanning (pl.concat under the hood)
• A minimal in-memory/TTL result cache
• Time-travel scans (AT clauses)
• Scalar function calls with scoped secrets and per-chunk input dedup
• Streaming and buffered table-in-out functions
• Blended (row-transform) table functions (cat.row_transform_function(schema, name)) — a worker function called with caller-supplied literal or column arguments and no separate table input, both the correlated-join shape (DuckDB's SELECT * FROM t, LATERAL geocode(t.place) equivalent: geocode(lf, pl.col("place"))) and the bare literal-call shape (geocode(None, 'some place'))
• Aggregate functions
• Subprocess, HTTP, and TCP transports

Not implemented:

• Writes
• Companion-catalog federation
• Per-table time-travel discovery
• The container:///github:// transport schemes (a substantially larger effort — a from-scratch Python transport layer, not an extension of the existing scheme table). launch:/unix:// (a launcher-managed shared worker) is implemented in the underlying vgi-python client (Client.from_launch, v0.29.4+) but not yet wired into attach()'s scheme detection here.

Development

git clone https://github.com/Query-farm/vgi-polars.git
git clone https://github.com/Query-farm/vgi-python.git   # sibling checkout — see below
cd vgi-polars
uv sync
uv run pytest -v

vgi-python is pulled from that local sibling checkout ([tool.uv.sources] in pyproject.toml, path ../vgi-python) rather than the published PyPI release, because this repo tracks vgi-python's client-side surface as both projects develop together — the same pattern vgi-spark's settings.gradle.kts uses to composite-build a sibling vgi-java checkout. Integration tests need a vgi-fixture-worker binary from that checkout; VGI_PYTHON (default ~/Development/vgi-python) picks which one, and VGI_TEST_WORKER overrides the binary path directly if you need something other than the default venv location.

uv run mypy src/, uv run ruff check src/ tests/, and uv run ruff format --check src/ tests/ mirror what CI runs; tests/test_docstrings.py runs pydoclint as part of the normal pytest run rather than as a separate step.

Learn more

CLAUDE.md is this repo's deep-dive doc — full architecture, every non-obvious behavior discovered while building this (with the live evidence behind each one), and a more detailed, evidence-backed version of the Status section above. Not required reading to use the package; it's there for contributors and for anyone who wants the "why," not just the "what."

License

Apache License, Version 2.0 — see LICENSE.