Release DataFusion `52.0.0` (Dec 2025 / Jan 2026)

[alamb]

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

Tracking ticket for next release, also a place to track desired inclusions

Previous release will be #17558 (Nov, 2025) so next major release would be approximately late Dec 2025 / early Jan 2026

Steps:

• Create a branch-52 branch:
• Update version and changelog:
• Test with DataFusion Python
• Test with DataFusion Comet
• Test with delta.rs:
• Test vortex:
• Test with iceberg-rust:
• Test with LakeSail:
• Test with parquet viewer
• Test with datafusion-materialized-views
• Test with ballista
• Voting Thread:
• Publish to crates.io
• Create ticket for next release:
• Create blog post:

Features to mention in the blog (if they make it)

• Support Arrow IPC Stream Files #18457
• [EPIC] A collection of items to improve CASE performance #18075
• feat: change Expr OuterReferenceColumn and Alias to Box type for reducing expr struct size #16771
• Examples of extending SQL syntax #17824 from the @theirix

Bugs that should be fixed

• Regression: error planning TPC-DS query: input schema nullability mismatch #17801

Community Wishlist

• Streaming Aggregate operator not being used in deduplication of pre-sorted Parquet files #16919
• Regression: DataFrameWriteOptions::with_single_file_output produces a directory #13323
• fix(parquet): converting parquet schema with backward compatible repeated struct/primitive with provided arrow schema arrow-rs#8496
• Respect execution timezone in to_timestamp and related functions #18025

[milenkovicm]

@alamb is it ok if I add "test with ballista" checkbox to the list ?

[alamb]

@alamb is it ok if I add "test with ballista" checkbox to the list ?

of course -- please do!