You might be interested in checking out Ibis (https://ibis-project.org/). It provides a dataframe-like API, abstracting over many common execution engines (duckdb, postgres, bigquery, spark, ...). Ibis wrapping duckdb has pretty much replaced pandas as my tool of choice for local data analysis. All the performance of duckdb with all the ergonomics of a dataframe API. (disclaimer: I contribute to Ibis for work).