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Airflow & DAGs · Advanced Development

logical_date vs actual runtime

Hardairflow-24
logical-dateschedulingdata-interval

Question

What is the difference between logical_date and actual runtime?

Solution

logical_date is the data interval / scheduled period for a DAG run. It is not necessarily the clock time when the task started.

A daily DAG for "data for January 1" may actually execute after that interval ends (for example on January 2).

logical date → what interval this run represents
actual runtime → when Airflow executes it

Get this wrong and partition paths and incremental loads go sideways.

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