The data orchestration space includes tools like Airflow, Luigi, Prefect, Argo, and Mage. Dagster distinguishes itself with an asset-centric approach to data pipelines.
This guide covers Dagster's core concepts: assets, resources, IO managers, jobs, schedules, and partitions. Together, these building blocks create composable and maintainable data pipelines.
The Asset-Centric Approach
Traditional orchestrators focus on tasks and their dependencies. Dagster inverts this: the focus is on the data artifacts (assets) you want to produce, and the tasks are derived from those definitions.
This approach provides several advantages:
- Observability — The UI shows what data exists and when it was last updated
- Debugging — Assets are independently testable and re-runnable
- Composability — Storage backends can be swapped without changing business logic
- Production-readiness — Built-in support for partitioning, backfills, and event-driven triggers