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What is declarative?
A declarative data pipeline does not tell the order it needs to be executed but instead allows each step/task to find the best time and way to run. The declarative approach describes what the program does without explicitly specifying its control flow. Functional Data Engineering and Functional Programming is a declarative programming paradigm, in contrast to imperative programming paradigms.
# Declarative vs Imperative
Declarative approaches appeal because they make systems easier to debug and automate. It’s done by explicitly showing intention and offering a simple way to manage and apply changes. By explicitly declaring how the pipeline should look, for example, defining the data products that should exist, it becomes much easier to discover when it does not look like that, the reason why, and reconcile. It’s the foundation layer for your entire platform’s lineage, observability, and data quality monitoring.
Read more on Data Orchestration Trends: The Shift From Data Pipelines to Data Products.