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Koalas

Koalas: pandas API on Apache Spark

From databricks·Updated June 11, 2026·View on GitHub·

The Koalas project makes data scientists more productive when interacting with big data, by implementing the pandas DataFrame API on top of Apache Spark. The project is written primarily in Python, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 license, first published in 2019. It has gained significant community traction with 3,374 stars and 371 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: big-data, data-science, dataframe, mlflow, pandas.

Latest release: v1.8.2Version 1.8.2
October 19, 2021View Changelog →

DEPRECATED: Koalas supports Apache Spark 3.1 and below as it is officially included to PySpark in Apache Spark 3.2. This repository is now in maintenance mode. For Apache Spark 3.2 and above, please use PySpark directly.

<p align="center"> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/databricks/koalas/master/icons/koalas-logo.png" width="140"/> </p> <p align="center"> pandas API on Apache Spark <br/> <a href="https://koalas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/?badge=latest"><strong>Explore Koalas docs »</strong></a> <br/> <br/> <a href="https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/databricks/koalas/master?filepath=docs%2Fsource%2Fgetting_started%2F10min.ipynb">Live notebook</a> · <a href="https://github.com/databricks/koalas/issues">Issues</a> · <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/koalas-dev">Mailing list</a> <br/> <strong><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-thirsty-koalas-devastated-by-recent-fires">Help Thirsty Koalas Devastated by Recent Fires</a></strong> </p>

The Koalas project makes data scientists more productive when interacting with big data, by implementing the pandas DataFrame API on top of Apache Spark.

pandas is the de facto standard (single-node) DataFrame implementation in Python, while Spark is the de facto standard for big data processing. With this package, you can:

  • Be immediately productive with Spark, with no learning curve, if you are already familiar with pandas.
  • Have a single codebase that works both with pandas (tests, smaller datasets) and with Spark (distributed datasets).

We would love to have you try it and give us feedback, through our mailing lists or GitHub issues.

Try the Koalas 10 minutes tutorial on a live Jupyter notebook here. The initial launch can take up to several minutes.

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Getting Started

Koalas can be installed in many ways such as Conda and pip.

bash
# Conda conda install koalas -c conda-forge
bash
# pip pip install koalas

See Installation for more details.

For Databricks Runtime, Koalas is pre-installed in Databricks Runtime 7.1 and above. Try Databricks Community Edition for free. You can also follow these steps to manually install a library on Databricks.

Lastly, if your PyArrow version is 0.15+ and your PySpark version is lower than 3.0, it is best for you to set ARROW_PRE_0_15_IPC_FORMAT environment variable to 1 manually.
Koalas will try its best to set it for you but it is impossible to set it if there is a Spark context already launched.

Now you can turn a pandas DataFrame into a Koalas DataFrame that is API-compliant with the former:

python
import databricks.koalas as ks import pandas as pd pdf = pd.DataFrame({'x':range(3), 'y':['a','b','b'], 'z':['a','b','b']}) # Create a Koalas DataFrame from pandas DataFrame df = ks.from_pandas(pdf) # Rename the columns df.columns = ['x', 'y', 'z1'] # Do some operations in place: df['x2'] = df.x * df.x

For more details, see Getting Started and Dependencies in the official documentation.

Contributing Guide

See Contributing Guide and Design Principles in the official documentation.

FAQ

See FAQ in the official documentation.

Best Practices

See Best Practices in the official documentation.

Koalas Talks and Blogs

See Koalas Talks and Blogs in the official documentation.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from databricks/koalas via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/13/2026