GraphViz + Ibis

Ibis supports visualizing an expression as a directed graph using GraphViz.

To get started, make sure you’ve installed the necessary dependencies.

$ pip install 'ibis-framework[duckdb,examples,visualization]'

Replace duckdb with your backend of choice

For instance, you can replace duckdb with snowflake if you want to use the Snowflake backend.

Let’s run through a few examples.

First we’ll import the things we need.

import ibis

from ibis import _
from ibis.expr.visualize import to_graph

Now we can visualize an expression graph.

Here’s a call to select.

t = ibis.examples.penguins.fetch()
expr = t.select(lowered=_.species.lower())
to_graph(expr)

The way to read the graph is from top to bottom.

The top of the graph contains Ibis operations with no dependents.
The edges encode dependencies from one node to another.
The bold text in the rectangles is the name of the Ibis operation class.
The bottom of the graph contains Ibis operations with no dependencies.
If this were a data flow graph, data would flow from bottom to top.

Let’s look at a more complex example: group_by.

expr = (
    t.group_by(_.species)
    .agg(
        bill_depth_avg=_.bill_depth_mm.mean(),
        bill_length_avg=_.bill_length_mm.mean(),
    )
)
to_graph(expr)

Switching gears, let’s look at a join and show customization of node and edge attributes.

left = ibis.table(dict(a="int64", b="string"), name="left")
right = ibis.table(dict(b="string", c="int64", d="string"), name="right")
expr = (
    left.inner_join(right, "b")
    .select(left.a, b=right.c, c=right.d)
    .mutate(arrays=ibis.array([1, 2, 3]))
)
to_graph(
    expr,
    label_edges=True,
    node_attr={"shape": "hexagon", "color": "green", "fontname": "Roboto Mono"},
    edge_attr={"fontsize": "12", "fontname": "Comic Sans MS"}
)

Please try out to_graph and give us feedback on Zulip or in a GitHub issue!