🚀 Performance improvements

• Improve binview extend/ifthenelse (#18164)
• Start on better Parquet delta decoding (#18049)
• Rechunk group-by __iter__ (#18162)
• Tune jemalloc to not create muzzy pages (#18148)
• Reduce default async thread count (#18142)
• Make expensive selector expansion lazy (#18118)
• Use single threaded algorithms if only 1 core given (#18101)
• Use Arc<Vec<_>> instead of Arc<[_]> for paths and hive partitions (#18066)
• SIMD View from FixedSizeBinary (#18059)
• Use bitmask to filter Parquet predicate-pushdown items (#17993)
• Zerocopy buffers for FixedSizeBinary to BinaryView cast (#18043)

✨ Enhancements

• Create literals for datetime/date expressions (#18184)
• Create literals in 'datetime' expression (#18182)
• Expose top-level "has_header" param for read_excel and read_ods (#18078)
• Raise on invalid 'is_between' and improve error message quality (#18147)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Fix struct shift and list builder (#18189)
• Don't load Parquet nested metadata (#18183)
• Throw bigidx error for Parquet row-count (#18154)
• Fix unpivot on empty df (#18179)
• Don't vertically parallelize cse contexts (#18177)
• Ensure default values are included when saving/restoring the current Config state (#18151)
• Properly handle empty Parquet row groups with no dictionary (#18161)
• Struct outer nullabillity (#18156)
• Fix pyarrow predicate pushdown regression (#18145)
• Prevent unwanted supertype cast in 'search_sorted' (#18143)
• Parquet with filter=None (#18139)
• Don't raise when converting from pandas if index contains duplicate names when include_index=False (the default) (#18133)
• Fix cast Float to String where Float is not turn to Integer before turning to String (#18123)
• Don't remove leading whitespace in read_csv (#18131)
• Py-polars compilation with no features (#18129)
• String transform to_titlecase was too narrowly defined (#18122)
• Reading Parquet with Null dictionary page (#18112)
• When setting write_excel column totals, don't forget to include any row-total cols (#18042)
• Incorrect lazy CSV select(len()) for compressed files (#18067)
• Fix sink_ipc_cloud panicking with runtime error (#18091)
• Properly write Parquet for sliced lists (#18073)
• Panic reading multiple CSV files from cloud (#18056)
• Fix CloudWriter to use buffer before making requests (#18027)
• Fix typos and remove trailing whitespace (#18024)
• Handle cfg(feature) for shrink_dtype (#18038)

📖 Documentation

• Fix references to old methods in lazy docstring (#18178)
• Include PyCapsule Interface in DataFrame and Series API docs (#18174)
• Corrected example result in group_by docs (#18169)
• Mention 'Array' in data types overview (#18060)
• Correct concat rechunk in user guide (#18080)
• Fix typo in title of Hugging Face docs page (#18097)
• Update pivot docstring for clarity (#18000)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Remove unneeded growable (#18165)
• Update Cargo.lock to fix build error on Linux (#18153)
• Remove Nth,Wildcard from ExprIR and make conversion falllible (#18115)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @EricTulowetzke, @KDruzhkin, @MarcoGorelli, @Vincenthays, @alexander-beedie, @coastalwhite, @davanstrien, @deanm0000, @ember91, @kylebarron, @mcrumiller, @nameexhaustion, @orlp, @philss, @ritchie46 and @rosstitmarsh