Splitgraph implements most of its functionality in the sgr command line client that submits SQL queries to the engine over a normal Postgres connection to manage Splitgraph metadata and perform operations on data images.

While the client is written in Python, this doesn't negatively impact Splitgraph's performance, because PostgreSQL itself can do the heavy lifting since Splitgraph implements most of its operations using the SQL standard.

The client ships as a single Python package, splitgraph, which allows a user to also call Splitgraph in Python to perform the same operations. However, it is not necessary to have a working Python environment to use Splitgraph: the easiest way to get sgr is by using a single PyInstaller binary from the releases page.