What is a DAG?
💡 Model Answer
A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no cycles. Each edge has a direction, and there is no way to start at a node and follow a sequence of edges that leads back to the same node. DAGs are fundamental in representing workflows, dependencies, and data pipelines. For example, Apache Airflow uses DAGs to schedule and orchestrate tasks; each node represents a task and edges represent execution order. Because there are no cycles, DAGs guarantee that tasks can be executed in a topological order, ensuring that prerequisites are met before downstream tasks run. DAGs also appear in compiler optimizations, build systems, and version control histories. They provide a clear, acyclic structure that simplifies scheduling, parallelism, and dependency resolution.
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