AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is sensor?
Sensor: In Airflow, a special kind of task that does no data work itself but waits until an external condition becomes true, such as a file appearing or another workflow finishing, before letting downstream tasks proceed.
Sensor: an example
A sensor polls an S3 path every five minutes and releases the pipeline once the partner's daily file arrives.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Shuffle
- Slowly changing dimension
- Small files problem
- Snowflake
- Snowflake schema
- Star schema
- Stream processing
- Surrogate key
Where you learn it
Sensor is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.