Ah. Well, that clearly works for a lot of people and sounds similar to how pandas works, though it's actually the opposite of what I'm describing here, which is

Ah. Well, that clearly works for a lot of people and sounds similar to how pandas works, though it's actually the opposite of what I'm describing here, which is the option to write SQL directly against a tabular data frames. For now, this is possible in Python through what I'd describe as out of the mainstream open source modules that are reputable and written by good programmers but may not be actively maintained. I get the impression that a sqldf in R is a bit more mainstream among R programmers, though I'm not sure of this.