What is a directed acyclic graph (DAG)?

Hazelcast named in the Gartner ® Market Guide for Event Stream Processing. Download Now A directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a conceptual representation of activities depicted by a graph, which is visually presented as a set of circles.

What is a DAG graph?

A DAG is a D irected A cyclic G raph, a type of graph whose nodes are directionally related to each other and don’t form a directional closed loop. In the practice of analytics engineering, DAGs are often used to visually represent the relationships between your data models.

What is a directed graph?

In this DAG, each vertex (line) has a specific direction (denoted by the arrow) connecting different nodes. This is the key quality of a directed graph: data can follow only in the direction of the vertex. In this example, data can go from A to B, but never B to A.

What are the key components of a DAG?

The key components of a DAG are that nodes (sources/models/exposures) are directionally linked and don’t form acyclic loops. Overall, DAGs are an effective tool for understanding data lineage, dependencies, and areas of improvement in your data models.