BigData / Apache Airflow Interview Questions

What is backfilling in Apache Airflow?

Backfilling is the process of running a DAG for historical date ranges that were not previously executed. You can trigger a backfill from the CLI:

airflow dags backfill --start-date 2024-01-01 --end-date 2024-03-31 my_dag

This creates DAG Runs for every schedule interval between the start and end dates. Backfilling is useful when you add a new DAG with start_date in the past and want to process historical data, or when a pipeline was down and you need to reprocess missed intervals.

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How do you trigger a backfill for a DAG via the Airflow CLI? airflow dags trigger --historical my_dag

✗ Try again if not.

airflow dags backfill --start-date ... --end-date ... my_dag

✓ Correct! Well done.

airflow tasks rerun my_dag

✗ Try again if not.

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