“Large data” work flows using pandas

Question

I have tried to puzzle out an answer to this question for many months while learning pandas. I use SAS for my day-to-day work and it is great for it\'s out-of-core support.

Answer 1

I recently came across a similar issue. I found simply reading the data in chunks and appending it as I write it in chunks to the same csv works well. My problem was adding a date column based on information in another table, using the value of certain columns as follows. This may help those confused by dask and hdf5 but more familiar with pandas like myself.

def addDateColumn():
"""Adds time to the daily rainfall data. Reads the csv as chunks of 100k 
   rows at a time and outputs them, appending as needed, to a single csv. 
   Uses the column of the raster names to get the date.
"""
    df = pd.read_csv(pathlist[1]+"CHIRPS_tanz.csv", iterator=True, 
                     chunksize=100000) #read csv file as 100k chunks

    '''Do some stuff'''

    count = 1 #for indexing item in time list 
    for chunk in df: #for each 100k rows
        newtime = [] #empty list to append repeating times for different rows
        toiterate = chunk[chunk.columns[2]] #ID of raster nums to base time
        while count <= toiterate.max():
            for i in toiterate: 
                if i ==count:
                    newtime.append(newyears[count])
            count+=1
        print "Finished", str(chunknum), "chunks"
        chunk["time"] = newtime #create new column in dataframe based on time
        outname = "CHIRPS_tanz_time2.csv"
        #append each output to same csv, using no header
        chunk.to_csv(pathlist[2]+outname, mode='a', header=None, index=None)