Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the pipeline is drawn as boxes with arrows, nothing points backwards, and a step waits for everything pointing at it.
DAG
Also calleddirected acyclic graph, workflow graph
The dependency graph of a pipeline: steps as nodes, dependencies as edges, no cycles. Acyclicity is what makes a run finite and orderable, and it is why a pipeline that genuinely needs a loop has to express it as a sequence of runs instead. In practice the word is used loosely for the pipeline itself, so 'the DAG failed' means a run failed rather than anything about graph theory.