Skip to content

Scheduling Queries in Airflow

  • bigquery-etl has tooling to automatically generate Airflow DAGs for scheduling queries
  • To be scheduled, a query must be assigned to a DAG that is specified in dags.yaml
    • New DAGs can be configured in dags.yaml, e.g., by adding the following: 
      bqetl_ssl_ratios: # name of the DAG; must start with bqetl_
  schedule_interval: 0 2 * * * # query schedule
  description: The DAG schedules SSL ratios queries.
  default_args:
    owner: example@mozilla.com
    start_date: "2020-04-05" # YYYY-MM-DD
    email: ["example@mozilla.com"]
    retries: 2 # number of retries if the query execution fails
    retry_delay: 30m
    • All DAG names need to have bqetl_ as prefix.
    • schedule_interval is either defined as a CRON expression or alternatively as one of the following CRON presets: once, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
    • start_date defines the first date for which the query should be executed
      • Airflow will not automatically backfill older dates if start_date is set in the past, backfilling can be done via the Airflow web interface
    • email lists email addresses alerts should be sent to in case of failures when running the query
  • Alternatively, new DAGs can also be created via the bqetl CLI by running bqetl dag create bqetl_ssl_ratios --schedule_interval='0 2 * * *' --owner="example@mozilla.com" --start_date="2020-04-05" --description="This DAG generates SSL ratios."
  • To schedule a specific query, add a metadata.yaml file that includes a scheduling section, for example: 
    friendly_name: SSL ratios
# ... more metadata, see Query Metadata section above
scheduling:
  dag_name: bqetl_ssl_ratios
    • Additional scheduling options:
      • depends_on_past keeps query from getting executed if the previous schedule for the query hasn't succeeded
      • date_partition_parameter - by default set to submission_date; can be set to null if query doesn't write to a partitioned table
      • parameters specifies a list of query parameters, e.g. ["n_clients:INT64:500"]
      • arguments - a list of arguments passed when running the query, for example: ["--append_table"]
      • referenced_tables - manually curated list of tables the query depends on; used to speed up the DAG generation process or to specify tables that the dry run doesn't have permissions to access, e. g. [['telemetry_stable', 'main_v4']]
      • multipart indicates whether a query is split over multiple files part1.sql, part2.sql, ...
      • depends_on defines external dependencies in telemetry-airflow that are not detected automatically: 
        depends_on:
  - task_id: external_task
    dag_name: external_dag
    execution_delta: 1h
        • task_id: name of task query depends on
        • dag_name: name of the DAG the external task is part of
        • execution_delta: time difference between the schedule_intervals of the external DAG and the DAG the query is part of
      • trigger_rule: The rule that determines when the airflow task that runs this query should run. The default is all_success ("trigger this task when all directly upstream tasks have succeeded"); other rules can allow a task to run even if not all preceding tasks have succeeded. See the Airflow docs for the list of trigger rule options.
      • destination_table: The table to write to. If unspecified, defaults to the query destination; if None, no destination table is used (the query is simply run as-is). Note that if no destination table is specified, you will need to specify the submission_date parameter manually
      • external_downstream_tasks defines external downstream dependencies for which ExternalTaskMarkers will be added to the generated DAG. These task markers ensure that when the task is cleared for triggering a rerun, all downstream tasks are automatically cleared as well. 
        external_downstream_tasks:
  - task_id: external_downstream_task
    dag_name: external_dag
    execution_delta: 1h
  • Queries can also be scheduled using the bqetl CLI: ./bqetl query schedule path/to/query_v1 --dag bqetl_ssl_ratios
  • To generate all Airflow DAGs run ./bqetl dag generate
    • Generated DAGs are located in the dags/ directory
    • Dependencies between queries scheduled in bigquery-etl and dependencies to stable tables are detected automatically
  • Specific DAGs can be generated by running ./bqetl dag generate bqetl_ssl_ratios
  • Generated DAGs do not need to be checked into main. CI automatically generates DAGs and writes them to the telemetry-airflow-dags repo from where Airflow will pick them up
  • Generated DAGs will be automatically detected and scheduled by Airflow
    • It might take up to 10 minutes for new DAGs and updates to show up in the Airflow UI
  • To generate tasks for importing data from Fivetran that an ETL task depends on add: 
    depends_on_fivetran:
  - task_id: fivetran_import_1
  - task_id: another_fivetran_import
    • The Fivetran connector ID needs to be set as a variable <task_id>_connector_id in the Airflow admin interface for each import task