These are great questions and topics I plan on addressing in a future blog post. SQL is a great convenience for simple analytical queries and it can be nice to be able to mix and match SQL and other access patterns (this is one thing I like with the Apache Spark DataFrame approach).

It's true that the Rust ecosystem for data science is not really there yet and I am trying to inspire people to start changing that. I think Rust does have some good potential here.

In the nearer term though I am exploring options around support user code in distributed query execution and I don't want to limit it to Rust.