hey folks—i’m new to Prefect and am trying to understand how one might approach configuring a flow so that it has access to its own previous execution date (similar to airflow’s

prev_execution_date_success

variable). in reading the docs, caching doesn’t quite seem like the right fit. persisting output makes sense, but not clear to me the right way to re-consume that output on a future flow run. so at this point my inclination is to simply read/write the last run timestamp to a local file. anyone have a recipe, docs, or otherwise on a better approach?

I don't think prefect persists the execution date, but I could be wrong. So my approach would be similiar to what you have in mind, except that I might use a flow state handler to write the date when the flow enters success state, and then I'd use the Result interface to write to flow storage rather than writing to a file. Then I'd have a prefect task that reads from that storage location, upon which that date can be used by other tasks.

Access to this metadata would be super useful, especially since ETL jobs usually run periodically, and scoped within a certain start and end date/time.

thanks @Amanda Wee! i’ll give it a try. @Jay Vercellone —agreed. my use case is a incremental load in which we only need to process records which were modified since the last successful run.