🚀 Performance improvements

• add new when-then-otherwise kernels (#15089)
• Coerce sorted flag of unit arrays during concat (#15104)
• Use sorted flag for (first|last)_non_null (#15050)
• OOC sort improvements (#14994)

✨ Enhancements

• improved dtype inference/refinement for read_database results (#15126)
• raise if both closed and by are passed to rolling_* aggregations (#15108)
• raise informative error for rolling_* aggs with by of invalid dtype (#15088)
• add non_existent arg to replace_time_zone (#15062)
• Support single nested row encodings (#15105)
• make ooc sort configurable (#15084)
• Make register_plugin a standalone function and include shared lib discovery (#14804)
• Expose infer_schema_length parameter on read_database (#15076)
• Async parquet: Decode parquet on a blocking thread pool (#15083)
• let "ambiguous" take "null" value (#14961)
• Raise informative error message when join would introduce duplicate column name (#15042)
• Allow cast of decimal to boolean (#15015)
• Add strict parameter to DataFrame constructor to allow non-strict construction (#15034)
• Support Array statistics in parquet (#15031)
• Support decimal groupby (#15000)
• Add thread names to rayon thread pool (#15024)
• Support decimal uniq (#15001)
• expose timings in verbose state of OOC sort (#14979)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Support BinaryView in row decoder to prevent a panic in streaming group by (#15117)
• Binview chunked gather; don't modify inlined view (#15124)
• Fix chunked_id gather for binview buffers (#15123)
• Don't cache HTTP object stores as they maintain URL state (#15121)
• Output u32 when sum_horizontal provided with single boolean column (#15114)
• Propagate error instead of panicking when calling product on an invalid type (#15093)
• Raise error when casting Array to different width (#14995)
• Fix file scan bugs for ipc, csv and parquet that occur with combinations of glob paths, row indices and predicates (#15065)
• Incorrectly preserved sorted flag when concatenating sorted series containing nulls (#15082)
• Return largest non-NaN value for max() on sorted float arrays if it exists instead of NaN (#15060)
• return NaN for all-NaN min/max (#15066)
• Prevent "index out of range for slice" error in parquet reader (#15021)
• Respect nulls_last in streaming sort (#15061)
• Fix Series construction from nested list with mixed data types (#15046)
• Don't count nulls in streaming count agg (#15051)
• agg_list on decimal lost scale (#15054)
• Block predicate pushdown on equality that are use in join (#15055)
• Enum equality based on categories (#15053)
• Don't panic in string_addition_to_linear_concat (#15006)
• CSV do utf8-validation after escaping fields (#15004)
• Use primitive constructors to create a Series of lists when dtype is provided (#15002)
• replace_time_zone with single-null-element "ambiguous" was panicking (#14971)

📖 Documentation

• Update write_database code blocks in user guide (#15106)
• Add missing docstring examples in the Struct namespace (#15071)
• Improve API reference landing page (#14888)
• improve join_asof example (#14993)
• Fix inadvertent swap of new and old parameters in replace description (#15019)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Extend and speed up scan tests (#15127)
• Add parameterized-scan-tests (#15057)
• Simplify streaming execution (#15039)
• Ensure we hit the spilled source path in ooc sort test (#15010)
• Refactor constructor code (#15009)
• fix features (#14977)
• Revert pinning PyPI publish action (#14975)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @JackRolfe, @MKisilyov, @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @c-peters, @flisky, @jqnatividad, @mcrumiller, @mickvangelderen, @nameexhaustion, @orlp, @petrosbar, @ritchie46, @stinodego and @trueb2