

User Interface: Airflow provides a good graphical interface where you can monitor and admin DAGs. Integration of the diverse tasks is really cool. This makes easy to code, maintain, and support. With other scheduling tool (such as Cronacle, Autosys) you may need to create different steps to handle this, but in Airflow different types of code/functionality can be written as separate tasks and call them in a single DAG. This gives ability to run different kind of program/code in a single DAG. Programming gives you immense power to control flow, change behavior at run time, parametrize, handle exceptions and errors.Įasy Integration of heterogeneous tasks : Airflow has various types of operators like Python ,SQL, BigQuery, Docker, MySQL, Hive and many more. This is difficult to handle with the traditional scheduling tools. Here Airflow comes handy! You can generate the ETL pipeline at run time instead of defining them statically. If you like programming, definitely you will prefer to use Airflow over any other workflow management tool.ĭynamic- Many times you need to create dynamic pipelines based on incoming data or business needs. This gives you lot of flexibility to handle schedule and dependency. You are writing our workflow in the programming language instead of using some custom UI or SQL type of script.
#AIRFLOW ETL CODE#
Pure Python -You write Airflow workflow/DAG code in Python. This is huge advantage because that helps us to save huge license/software cost.
#AIRFLOW ETL DOWNLOAD#
You can download it free and start using it. You don't have to pay anything for the license.

Open Source- Airflow is an open source software. Now lets see what are the advantages you get using Airflow: Next, you schedule those DAGs and monitor them. Therefore, workflow has definite execution path. in Airflow, such workflows are called DAG, that is directed acyclic graph. You group logically interdepended tasks together, that is called workflow. That specific functionality is called task. You develop ETL code (it may be SQL, Python, bash or anything as per our need), you group bunch of code together to achieve a specific functionality. Then, why there is Airflow? In this article lets answer this question and deep dive into the key advantages and disadvantages.įirst, lets see how you use Airflow for pipelines orchestration. There are many traditional tools like Autosys, Cronacle, Control M etc. When you develop ETL pipelines, you have many tasks for which you want to define dependencies and schedule them. It is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows. Airflow is getting very popular for the ETL workflow management (It can be used for other kind of workflow management too, but here our focus is ETL).
