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Vaex

Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualization and exploration of big tabular data at a billion rows per second ๐Ÿš€

From vaexioยทUpdated June 10, 2026ยทView on GitHubยท

Vaex is a high performance Python library for lazy **Out-of-Core DataFrames** (similar to Pandas), to visualize and explore big tabular datasets. It calculates *statistics* such as mean, sum, count, standard deviation etc, on an *N-dimensional grid* for more than **a billion** (`10^9`) samples/rows **per second**. Visualization is done using **histograms**, **density plots** and **3d volume rendering**, allowing interactive exploration of big data. Vaex uses memory mapping, zero memory copy poli... The project is written primarily in Python, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2014. It has gained significant community traction with 8,504 stars and 603 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: bigdata, data-science, dataframe, hdf5, machine-learning.

Latest release: vaexpaper_v1โ€” Version linked to the paper

Supported Python Versions
Documentation
Slack

What is Vaex?

Vaex is a high performance Python library for lazy Out-of-Core DataFrames
(similar to Pandas), to visualize and explore big tabular datasets. It
calculates statistics such as mean, sum, count, standard deviation etc, on an
N-dimensional grid for more than a billion (10^9) samples/rows per
second
. Visualization is done using histograms, density plots and 3d
volume rendering
, allowing interactive exploration of big data. Vaex uses
memory mapping, zero memory copy policy and lazy computations for best
performance (no memory wasted).

Installing

With pip:

$ pip install vaex

Or conda:

$ conda install -c conda-forge vaex

For more details, see the documentation

Key features

Instant opening of Huge data files (memory mapping)

HDF5 and Apache Arrow supported.

opening1a

opening1b

Read the documentation on how to efficiently convert your data from CSV files, Pandas DataFrames, or other sources.

Lazy streaming from S3 supported in combination with memory mapping.

opening1c

Expression system

Don't waste memory or time with feature engineering, we (lazily) transform your data when needed.

expression

Out-of-core DataFrame

Filtering and evaluating expressions will not waste memory by making copies; the data is kept untouched on disk, and will be streamed only when needed. Delay the time before you need a cluster.

occ-animated

Fast groupby / aggregations

Vaex implements parallelized, highly performant groupby operations, especially when using categories (>1 billion/second).

groupby

Fast and efficient join

Vaex doesn't copy/materialize the 'right' table when joining, saving gigabytes of memory. With subsecond joining on a billion rows, it's pretty fast!

join

More features

Contributing

See contributing page.

Slack

Join the discussion in our Slack channel!

Learn more about Vaex

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub โ†’

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