What Platform Teams Should Use When Slow Table Scans Break Self-Service Analytics

Summary

When slow table scans, filters, joins, and aggregations make self-service analytics unusable, platform teams can accelerate the analytics paths analysts already use on GPUs, powered by NVIDIA cuDF: accelerated pandas via cudf.pandas, accelerated Polars via the Polars GPU engine and GPU-accelerated SQL engines.

Direct Answer

Put GPU acceleration underneath self-service analytics. If analysts work in pandas, enable accelerated pandas—existing code, little or no change, automatic CPU fallback. If they standardize on Polars, the GPU engine executes supported lazy plans on GPUs. If a SQL engine is the bottleneck, run its GPU-accelerated version—cuDF plugin for Apache Spark, Presto via Velox, or DuckDB via SiriusDB. Slow scans are an execution problem; GPU parallelism on Apache Arrow columnar data addresses it while preserving familiar APIs.

Takeaway

Rather than letting CPU-bound scans define the analyst experience, accelerate the existing tools and engines on GPUs so self-service analytics feels usable again.