Outside the one story everyone remembers him for, Daksha's standing job in the tradition is population. As one of the Prajapatis, the lords of creatures charged by Brahma with filling the world, he is credited with a very large family of daughters, the Puranas differ on the exact count, and with marrying most of them outward into the pantheon rather than keeping a lineage of his own. The best known set is the twenty seven star wives given to the moon god Chandra, personifications of the lunar mansions, of whom Chandra is said to have favored one, Rohini, over the rest, drawing Daksha's anger a second time and a curse that leaves the moon waxing and waning ever since.
Sati, wife of Shiva, is the daughter later ages remember; the other Puranic accounts count Aditi, mother of the Adityas, among his daughters as well, though the Rigveda names Daksha himself as a son of Aditi in one hymn and her father in the next, a circularity the commentarial tradition treats as evidence of how old and how tangled the genealogy already was by the time the Puranas fixed it in prose. The name Daksha, able or skillful, fits a figure whose whole function is the practical work of populating a cosmos that Brahma has only just opened.