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Voltron Data, provider of enterprise support services for Apache Arrow, today announced that it is adding an enterprise support offering for Ibis, an open source Python framework for standardizing analytics and queries across multiple backends. The move is a next step in building out Voltron Data’s portfolio of enterprise support offerings and furthers the company’s goal of continuing to invest in open source technologies. This announcement comes at The Data Thread, a virtual learning event hosted by Voltron Data to highlight Apache Arrow and its practical applications, as well as to bring together practitioners, industry leaders, and members of the Arrow community.

Establishing standards

VentureBeat spoke with Voltron Data CEO Josh Patterson and discussed the importance of creating standards and communication across systems to eliminate pain points and reduce duplication of effort.

Apache Arrow and Ibis are both designed to provide standardized solutions to common pain points. Apache Arrow is an open source project that was developed to provide a unified format for in-memory representation of vector data, which eliminates the need for data to be serialized and deserialized between multiple formats. Eliminating that duplication of work generates efficiencies and, as Patterson said, “just allows developers to focus on things that they want to focus on.”

Ibis is a Python dataframe API and it provides a standardized framework to access data and query multiple backends using Python. The backends supported consist of both SQL databases and big data analytics databases, including Google BigQuery, Heavy.ai (formerly OmniSci), PostgreSQL, MySQL, and others. Ibis allows developers to write one kind of code to target multiple systems and switch between backends if needed, while keeping the ...