Ibis is a portable Python dataframe library that provides a backend-agnostic API for data manipulation and analytics across 20+ execution engines including DuckDB, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Spark, and Polars. Unlike pandas which operates in-memory, Ibis uses lazy evaluation to compile Python expressions into optimized SQL or engine-native code, enabling scalable analytics on massive datasets without loading data into memory. The key insight: write transformation logic once in a pandas-like API, then execute it on any supported backend—from local DuckDB for prototyping to cloud data warehouses for production—without rewriting code.