Airflow Asset originated from data lineage and evolved into its current state, being used as a scheduling concept (data-aware, event-based scheduling). It has even more potential. This talk discusses how other parts of Airflow, namely Connection and Object Storage, contain concepts related to Asset, and we can tie them all together to make task authoring flow even more naturally. Planned topics: Brief history on Asset and related constructs. Current state of Asset concepts. Inlets, anyone? Finding inspiration from Pydantic et al. My next step for Asset.

This session explores how to bring unit testing to SQL pipelines using Airflow. I’ll walk through the development of a SQL testing library that allows isolated testing of SQL logic by injecting mock data into base tables. To support this, we built a type system for AWS Glue tables using Pydantic, enabling schema validation and mock data generation. Over time, this type system also powered production data quality checks via a custom Airflow operator. Learn how this approach improves reliability, accelerates development, and scales testing across data workflows.