Transform the data with Pandas

You can fetch the results of any SQL query as a dataframe. If the destination supports that natively (i.e., BigQuery and DuckDB), dlt uses the native method. Thanks to this, reading dataframes can be really fast! The example below reads GitHub reactions data from the issues table and counts the reaction types.

pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
    pipeline_name="github_pipeline",
    destination="duckdb",
    dataset_name="github_reactions",
    dev_mode=True
)
with pipeline.sql_client() as client:
    with client.execute_query(
        'SELECT "reactions__+1", "reactions__-1", reactions__laugh, reactions__hooray, reactions__rocket FROM issues'
    ) as cursor:
        # calling `df` on a cursor, returns the data as a pandas data frame
        reactions = cursor.df()
counts = reactions.sum(0).sort_values(0, ascending=False)

The df method above returns all the data in the cursor as a data frame. You can also fetch data in chunks by passing the chunk_size argument to the df method.

Once your data is in a Pandas dataframe, you can transform it as needed.

Other transforming tools

If you want to transform the data before loading, you can use Python. If you want to transform the data after loading, you can use Pandas or one of the following:

1. dbt. (recommended)
2. dlt SQL client.