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Home/Questions/Spark/Big Data/What is a DAG in Apache Airflow, and how is it used for scheduling workflows?

What is a DAG in Apache Airflow, and how is it used for scheduling workflows?

Spark/Big Dataeasy0.4 min readPremium
Frequency
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Asked at 1 company
Category
452
questions in Spark/Big Data
Difficulty Split
88E|81M|283H
in this category
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1,863
across 7 categories
Asked at these companies
Citi
Key Concepts Tested
airflow
Expert AnswerPremium
73 wordsInterview-ready
**DAG**: Directed Acyclic Graph. Tasks = nodes; dependencies = edges. No cycles. Defines workflow. **Scheduling**: Airflow parses DAG; respects dependencies; runs task when upstream succeed. Enables parallelism (independent tasks), retries, monitoring. **Why DAG**: Explicit ordering; clear data flow. Acyclic = no infinite loops. **Scalability Trade-offs**: Deep DAGs = long critical path. TaskGroups for organization....
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