Right, EDA is all about making quick iterations, and my point is that I can't think of ANY use cases for EDA on more than a machine's worth of data. (Other than "top" queries, which are useful, but SQL will give you that. You don't need data frames for simple analysis.)

In my experience, when people think they want to "explore" hundreds of terabytes of data (if that's even possible), they either don't have a good method of sampling (due to database limitations), or they haven't considered what kind of sampling they need to answer the question. I'm open to counterexamples where you need terabytes or petabytes of data and you can't sample, but I can't think of any myself.

And yes R is too inefficient to handle some problems on a single machine (or multiple machines), but data.table and dplyr are more efficient. I guess one anti-pattern I would see is -- R is too inefficient, let's run R on multiple machines! I think the better solution is to make use of your machine better, with packages like data.table and dplyr (or a future platform based on Arrow). I think it's easy to underestimate the practical problems of distributed computing.

You should really avoid distributed computing when you can!

And I agree that once you reach production, you do need different tools. In my experience, when you are dealing with hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data, you're writing a fairly optimized program with a big data framework. NOT using data frames. Big data frameworks are already pretty inefficient -- as you mention, if you run them on a local machine, you see evidence of that. This is true of all the frameworks at Google written in C++ too. When you add the data frame abstraction, it's only going to get worse. Every layer adds some overhead.

So I am very big on data frames for data analysis obviously, but I question the value of distributed data frames.

Bringing it back to the article, having 2 abstractions definitely makes sense. You want a distributed disk-backed column store for storing huge amounts of data permanently. And then you want an in-memory format like Arrow for iteratively analyzing data using the data frame abstraction.

What's not clear to me is that you want a distributed in-memory abstraction as well. It's possible but I think there are so many other problems in the tools for data science -- I can easily name 10 problems with both R and Python ecosystems that are more important than distributed data frames.

To play devil's advocate, I do see the value in not rewriting your analysis when you go from prototype to production. I'm pretty big on that -- I like to ship the prototypes. That's pretty much the philosophy of Julia -- the prototype should be efficient.

But I see multiple challenges there for data science. Even if you had distributed data frames, it wouldn't solve that problem. For one thing, most analysts don't write their code with things like indices in mind, see my other comments here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597376

If the code could benefit from indices, and is not using them (like most programs that use data frames), then IMO they need major surgery anyway. It's not just a matter of flipping a switch and magically going from small to big. But yes I think the general idea of shipping your prototypes is appealing.