Exploring data with pandas and MapD using Apache Arrow

At MapD, we've long been big fans of the PyData stack, and are constantly working on ways for our open source GPU-accelerated analytic SQL engine to play nicely with the terrific tools in the most popular stack that supports open data science. We are founding collaborators of GOAI (the GPU Open Analytics Initiative), working with the awesome folks at Anaconda and H2O.ai, and our friends at NVIDIA. In GOAI, we use Apache Arrow to mediate efficient, high-performance data interchange for analytics and AI workflows. A big reason for doing this is to make MapD itself easily accessible to Python tools. For starters, this means supporting modern Python database interfaces like DBAPI.