---
title: "Conditionally pick an Airflow DAG branch using an SQL query"
description: "How to use the BranchSQLOperator to choose a DAG branch to execute"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/conditionally-pick-airflow-dag-branch-using-sql
---

In addition to the `BranchPythonOperator`, which lets us execute a Python function that returns the ids of the subsequent tasks that should run, we can also use a SQL query to choose a branch. Of course, we will not do it by querying the SQL database in the Python function. There is a shorter way.

We need to add a `BranchSQLOperator` to our DAG. This operator is a little bit different than the `BranchPythonOperator`. In the case of the Python operator, the function returns the ids of the tasks to run. The SQL version of the operator expects a boolean value in the first column of the first row. Optionally, it can also return a numeric. Every non-zero value is interpreted as True. Zero = False. We can also use one of the string values with a boolean equivalent (take a look at the documentation if you want to use a string value).

If the value is true, Airflow will execute the tasks specified in the `follow_task_ids_if_true` parameter. Otherwise, it runs the tasks defined in the `follow_task_ids_if_false` argument.

```python
operator = BranchSQLOperator(
    task_id="some_task_id",
    conn_id="sql_connection_id",
    sql="SELECT count(1) FROM a_table",
    follow_task_ids_if_true="task_to_execute_if_count_at_least_one",
    follow_task_ids_if_false="tasks_to_execute_if_counts_is_zero",
    dag=dag
)
```