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pandas-gbq Roadmap

The purpose of this package is to provide a small subset of BigQuery functionality that maps well to pandas.read_gbq and pandas.DataFrame.to_gbq. Those methods in the pandas library are a thin wrapper to the equivalent methods in this package.

Adding features to pandas-gbq

Considerations when adding new features to pandas-gbq:

  • New method? Consider an alternative, as the core focus of this library is read_gbq and to_gbq.
  • Breaking change to an existing parameter? Consider an alternative, as folks could be using an older version of pandas that doesn't account for the change when a newer version of pandas-gbq is installed. If you must, please follow a 1+ year deprecation timeline.
  • New parameter? Go for it! Be sure to also send a PR to pandas after the feature is released so that folks using the pandas wrapper can take advantage of it.
  • New data type? OK. If there's not a good mapping to an existing pandas dtype, consider adding one to the db-dtypes package.

Vision

The pandas-gbq package should do the "right thing" by default. This means you should carefully choose dtypes for maximum compatibility with BigQuery and avoid data loss. As new data types are added to BigQuery that don't have good equivalents yet in the pandas ecosystem, equivalent dtypes should be added to the db-dtypes package.

As new features are added that might improve performance, pandas-gbq should offer easy ways to use them without sacrificing usability. For example, one might consider using the api_method parameter of to_gbq to support the BigQuery Storage Write API.

A note on pandas.read_sql: we'd like to be compatible with this too, for folks that need better performance compared to the SQLAlchemy connector.

Usability

Unlike the more object-oriented client-libraries, it's natural to have a method with many parameters in the Python data science ecosystem. That said, the configuration argument is provided, which takes the REST representation of the job configuration so that power users can use new features without the need for an explicit parameter being added.

Conclusion

Keep it simple.

Don't break existing users.

Do the right thing by default.