I've played around a bit with ibis for some internal analytics stuff, and honestly it's pretty nice to have one unified api for duckdb, postgres, etc. saves you from a ton of headaches switching context between different query languages and syntax quirks. but like you said, performance totally depends on the underlying backend, and sometimes that's a mixed bag—duckdb flies, but certain others can get sluggish with more complex joins and aggregations.

polars cloud might have an advantage here since they're optimizing directly around polars' own rust-based engine. i've done a fair bit of work lately using polars locally (huge fan of the lazy api), and if they can translate that speed and ergonomics smoothly into the cloud, it could be a real winner. the downside is obviously potential lock-in, but if it makes my day-to-day data wrangling faster, it might be worth the tradeoff.

curious to see benchmarks soon against dask, ray, and spark for some heavy analytics workloads.