Techniques for automatically scheduling builds of derived datasets in a distributed database system that supports pipelined data transformations are described herein. In an embodiment, a data processing method comprises, in association with a distributed database system that implements one or more data transformation pipelines, each of the data transformation pipelines comprising at least a first dataset, a first transformation, a second derived dataset and dataset dependency and timing metadata, detecting an arrival of a new raw dataset or new derived dataset; in response to the detecting, obtaining from the dataset dependency and timing metadata a dataset subset comprising those datasets that depend on at least the new raw dataset or new derived dataset; for each member dataset in the dataset subset, determining if the member dataset has a dependency on any other dataset that is not yet arrived, and in response to determining that the member dataset does not have a dependency on any other dataset that is not yet arrived: initiating a build of a portion of the data transformation pipeline comprising the member dataset and all other datasets on which the member dataset is dependent, without waiting for arrival of other datasets.