databuild/docs/narrative/why-not-dags.md
Stuart Axelbrooke ea83610d35
Some checks failed
/ setup (push) Has been cancelled
A lot of refactoring
2025-09-27 15:29:22 -07:00

12 lines
846 B
Markdown

- Airflow and Luigi are OG data orchestrators that inspired databuild
- Airflow uses explicit declaration of DAG structure
- Luigi uses implicit, discovered DAG structure
- Both use DAG runs as a top-level unit of execution
- This is nice because you can see what's going to happen after the DAG run has launched
- This is not nice because you have to deal with mid-execution DAG runs during deployments - what do you do?
- Do you terminate existing dag runs and retrigger? (what if the workload is stateful? Don't do that!)
- Do you let existing dag runs finish?
- How do you deal with DAG run identity under changing DAG definition?
- These questions are all red herrings. We don't care about the DAG definition - we care about the data we want to produce.
- We should instead declare what partitions we want, and iteratively propagate