Does pandas and pyspark.pandas autoscale in spark?

Question

I'd like to know if the native pandas package auto scales like the pyspark.pandas package in Azure Synapse?

Answer 1

Hello Johnson, Matthew [DISYS],

Welcome to the MS Q&A platform.

No, the native pandas package does not auto-scale in Azure Synapse. The native pandas package is a Python library designed to work on a single machine, and it does not have built-in support for distributed computing.

Using PySpark pandas, you can take advantage of the distributed computing capabilities of Apache Spark to process large datasets in parallel across multiple nodes, which allows it to scale horizontally across multiple machines. This enables PySpark Pandas to handle large datasets that would be too big to fit into memory on a single machine.
If you need to work with large datasets in Azure Synapse, it is recommended that you use PySpark Pandas or other distributed data processing frameworks like Databricks or HDInsight.

References:

https://sparkbyexamples.com/pyspark/pandas-vs-pyspark-dataframe-with-examples/#:~:text=What%20is%20PySpark%3F,(100x)%20faster%20than%20Pandas.

https://medium.com/geekculture/pandas-vs-pyspark-fe110c266e5c

I hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any further questions.