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Installation

Requirements

  • Python 3.9+
  • pip or uv

Install

pip install timefence

Optional extras

# Jupyter notebook support
pip install timefence[notebook]

# Development dependencies
pip install timefence[dev]

dbt integration

A timefence[dbt] extra is planned for a future release. The from_dbt() function exists but is not yet implemented.

Dependencies

Timefence depends on:

Package Version Purpose
duckdb >= 1.0.0 Columnar SQL engine
click >= 8.0.0 CLI framework
rich >= 13.0.0 Terminal output
pandas >= 1.5.0 DataFrame interop
pyyaml >= 6.0 YAML config

No Spark, no JVM, no cloud infrastructure.

Performance

Built on DuckDB's columnar engine. Median of 3 runs after warmup (Intel i7, 16 GB):

Scenario Labels Features Build Audit
Small project 100K 1 0.5s 0.3s
Typical project 100K 10 1.9s 1.7s
Large project 1M 1 3.0s 2.0s
Large + many features 1M 10 12s 8.5s

Adding embargo, staleness, and splits costs seconds, not minutes.

Run benchmarks yourself
uv run python benchmarks/bench.py --quick
uv run python benchmarks/bench.py --quick --include-pandas

Verify installation

timefence --version
timefence doctor