Evaluate whether we should use Ibis for performing table operations

[daniel-thom]

Our current plan is to use sqlalchemy in order to support multiple SQL engines, either writing SQL strings for operations or using its expression API. We would have to write custom SQL strings for non-standard operations, such as reading Parquet and CSV files, pivot and unpivot, and time zone conversions.

Ibis may solve some of these problems.

• [x] read_csv
• [x] read_parquet
• [x] pivot / unpivot
• [ ] time zone conversion

[lixiliu]

As discussed,

Pro: Ibis can easily switch between backends, which makes it easy to scale up from DuckDB to Spark as needed and enables the use of dataframe API for data transformation (pivot/unpivot) and SQL for aggregations.

Cons: Need to learn a new API, API language is not attractive/intuitive. Does not have time zone conversion support.

Our non-standard operations and data transformation are limited to a few types, which we can support without Ibis. The cons outweigh the pros.