Merge and update dataframes based on a subset of their columns

Question

I wonder whether there is the fastest code to replace the two for loops, assuming the df size is very large. In my real case, each dataframe is 200 rows and 25 columns.

Answer 1

Some cleaning:

def clean_df(df):
    df.columns = df.iloc[0]
    df.columns.name = None        
    df = df.iloc[1:].reset_index()

    return df

df1 = clean_df(df1)
df1
   index Name Unit Attribute  Date
0      1    a    A         1  2014
1      2    b    B         2  2015
2      3    c    C         3  2016
3      4    d    D         4  2017
4      5    e    E         5  2018

df2 = clean_df(df2)
df2    
   index Name Unit  Date
0      1    a    F  2019
1      2    b    G  2020
2      3    e    H  2021
3      4    f    I  2022

---

Use merge, specifying on=Name, so the other columns are not considered.

cols = ['Name', 'Unit_y', 'Attribute', 'Date_y']
df1 = df1.merge(df2, how='left', on='Name')[cols]\
              .rename(columns=lambda x: x.split('_')[0]).fillna(df1)

df1
  Name Unit Attribute  Date
0    a    F         1  2019
1    b    G         2  2020
2    c    C         3  2016
3    d    D         4  2017
4    e    H         5  2021