Vaex
Overview
Vaex is a high-performance Python library designed for lazy, out-of-core DataFrames to process and visualize tabular datasets that are too large to fit into RAM. Vaex can process over a billion rows per second, enabling interactive data exploration and analysis on datasets with billions of rows.
Installation
Install the full meta-package (recommended):
uv pip install vaex
Minimal install (pick only what you need):
uv pip install vaex-core vaex-viz vaex-hdf5 vaex-ml
The vaex package is a meta-package that pulls in vaex-core, vaex-viz, vaex-hdf5, vaex-ml, and other sub-packages. Arrow support is built into vaex-core (the separate vaex-arrow package is deprecated). vaex-distributed is deprecated in favor of vaex-enterprise.
Version notes (vaex 4.19.0+): Python 3.12 and NumPy v2 require vaex >= 4.19.0. On Windows, you may need Python dev headers to build the annoy dependency.
When to Use This Skill
Use Vaex when:
- Processing tabular datasets larger than available RAM (gigabytes to terabytes)
- Performing fast statistical aggregations on massive datasets
- Creating visualizations and heatmaps of large dat…
