support 'hive partitioning' aware readers (#11284)
natively support reading parquet for aws, gcp and azure (#11210)
Add support for Iceberg (#10375)
The great expressification by @reswqa (#11320, #11344, #11313, #11257, #11288, #11275, #11197, #11167, #11155)

⚠️ Deprecations

Add disable_string_cache (#11020)

🚀 Performance improvements

improve dynamic_groupby_iter (#11341)
improve and fix rolling windows by linear scanning (#11326)
faster init from pydantic models that have a small number of fields, and support direct init from SQLModel data (often used with FastAPI) (#11263)
improve outer join materialization (#11241)
use ryu and itoa for primitive serialization (#11193)
use try-binary-elementwise instead of try-binary-elementwise-values in dt_truncate (#11189)
Using cache for str.contains regex compilation (#11183)

✨ Enhancements

introduce 'label' instead of 'truncate' in group_by_dynamic, which can take label='right' (#11337)
Expressify list.shift (#11320)
top_k and bottom_k supports pass an expr (#11344)
add "pyxlsb" engine support to read_excel (for excel binary workbook files) (#11248)
support 'hive partitioning' aware readers (#11284)
str.strip_chars supports take an expr argument (#11313)
sample n can take an expr (#11257)
Add disable_string_cache (#11020)
clip supports expr arguments and physical numeric dtype (#11288)
Introduce list.drop_nulls (#11272)
str.splitn and split_exact can take an expr argument by (#11275)
introduce ambiguous option for dt.round (#11269)
Adds NULLIF and COALESCE SQL functions (#11124)
better tree-formatting representation (#11176)
natively support reading parquet for aws, gcp and azure (#11210)
Expressify str.strip_prefix & suffix (#11197)
Add support for Iceberg (#10375)
list.join's separator can be expression (#11167)
argument every of datetime.truncate can be expression (#11155)

🐞 Bug fixes

Fix Series.__contains__ for None values and implement is_in for null Series (#11345)
don't panic on multi-nodes in streaming conversion (#11343)
ensure trailing quote is written for temporal data when CSV quote_style is non-numeric (#11328)
clarify has_validity docstring and fix several cases where the presence of a bitmask was used to incorrectly infer the existence of null values (#11319)
fix empty Series construction edge-case with Struct dtype (#11301)
DataFrame init from collections.namedtuple values (#11314)
Exclude functools wrapper frames in find_stacklevel (#11292)
set partitions independent of thread pool (#11304)
address VSCode issue with autocomplete on selector expressions in editor/console (#11235)
consume duplicates in rolling_by window (#11261)
handle url encoded paths in objectpath creation (#11240)
use POOL when writing csv (#11222)
don't conflate saved Config JSON string with file path (#11098)
is_in for bool evaluate has_false incorrectly (#11217)
improve handling of database drivers that can return arrow data (#11201)
fix nullable filter mask in group_by (#11207)
replace n-th in filter (#11206)
fix translation of Series-nested datetime/date values for scan_pyarrow predicates (#11195)
address unexpected expression name from use of unary - or + operators (#11158)
impl hash for more function expr (#11182)
list.join's separator can be expression (#11167)
Add some missing expr type hint for series (#11171)
consistently use negative every as the default for offset in group_by_dynamic (#11164)
Make pl.struct serializable (#11169)
only raise on actual parameter collision when "dtypes" specified in read_excel "read_csv_options" (#11162)
propagate null value for str/binary starts/ends_with and contains (#11141)

🛠️ Other improvements

simplify/clarify group_by_dynamic examples (#11335)
tighten assert_frame_equal for LazyFrames (don't collect until after the schema has been checked) (#11331)
unify display for namespaced function expr (#11342)
add lazy pivot example (#11325)
Use GITHUB_TOKEN to get contributor information for docs (#11321)
Enable version warning banner (#11322)
cross-reference null_count from has_validity (clarifies the correct way to check for nulls) (#11323)
Pin pydantic in dev requirements <2.4.0 (#11312)
remove default auto-explode for map_many_private (#11270)
Add type alias IntoExprColumn (#11296)
update a few dependencies (#11283)
Properly skip ADBC test (#11282)
Fix some minor Makefile issues (#11276)
update sponsors (#11271)
parametric tests for group_by_rolling (#11262)
Make some list function expr non-anonymous (#11230)
Mention the performant feature only once (#11223)
remove unneeded indirection (#11233)
remove unneeded mutex around object-store (#11224)
clarify every/period/offset in group_by_dynamic (#11175)
Fix read_database batch_size docstring (#11132)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @ByteNybbler, @Cheukting, @Fokko, @Hofer-Julian, @MarcoGorelli, @SeanTroyUWO, @alexander-beedie, @billylanchantin, @jonashaag, @mcrumiller, @orlp, @ptiza, @reswqa, @ritchie46, @stinodego and @universalmind303