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What is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)?

Last updated Sep 23, 2022 - Edit Source

DAG stands for Directed Acyclic Graph. A DAG is a graph where information must travel along with a finite set of nodes connected by vertices. There is no particular start or node and also no way for data to travel through the graph in a loop that circles back to the starting point.

It’s a popular way of building data pipelines in tools like Airflow, Dagster, Prefect. It clearly defines the  Data Lineage. As well, it’s made for a functional approach where you have the  idempotency to restart pipelines without side-effects.