Hi team is there any benefits using software defined asset o

Question

Hi team is there any benefits using software defined asset over using ops with AssetMaterialization

prha · Answer

Hi Son Great question Using ops with AssetMaterializations provides a lot of value in terms of recording the history of what has happened to a particular asset powering the historical views available in dagit However since these AssetMaterializations are all emitted at run time they are mostly useful for viewing what has happened in the past Using software defined assets by mapping the dependencies between assets enables a richer set of interactions You power the same historical views but you now enable a set of operational tools like being able to rematerialize an asset without mapping it to an op It also enables you to attach rich metadata like schema to the asset for a richer experience in Dagit I think we re just scratching the surface of what types of experiences we can build using software defined assets

prha · Answer

Some other concrete advantages with software defined assets Before executing an op or job you can know what assets it s going to produce You can navigate to the page for an asset and click a button to materialize it and its ancestors You can view a dependency graph of all assets automatically without having to explicitly build it since each asset knows about the assets it depends on

Son Giang · Answer

Thank you could you send me some links resources on how to explicitly build assets dependencies graph using AssetMaterialization as you mentioned

prha · Answer

I was referring to external tools not in Dagster that track data lineage data dependencies We did have an experimental feature that tracked asset lineage but that was really a precursor to software defined assets and might be deprecated soon You can read more about it here <https docs dagster io concepts assets asset materializations asset lineage >