Materialize Docs

Materialize is a streaming database for real-time applications. Materialize accepts input data from a variety of streaming sources (e.g. Kafka) and files (e.g. CSVs), and lets you query them using SQL.

What does Materialize do?

Materialize lets you ask questions about your data, and then get low-latency, correct answers, even as the underlying data changes.

Why not just use your database’s built-in functionality to perform these same computations? Because your database often acts as if it’s never been asked that question before, which means it can take a long time to come up with an answer, each and every time you pose the query.

Materialize instead keeps the results of the queries and incrementally updates them as new data comes in. So, rather than recalculating the answer each time it’s asked, Materialize continually updates the answer and gives you the answer’s current state from memory.

Importantly, Materialize supports incrementally updating a much broader set of views than is common in traditional databases (e.g. views over multi-way joins with complex aggregations), and can do incremental updates in the presence of arbitrary inserts, updates, and deletes in the input streams.

Why should I use Materialize?

If you perform any OLAP queries over relational data and want to reduce the time it takes to refresh answers to common queries, Materialize can make that happen.

For a sense of scale, it can take queries that most teams would run once-per-day and instead provide sub-second or single-digit second answers.

Learn more

• Install Materialize to try it out.
• What is Materialize? to learn more about what Materialize does and how it works.
• Architecture documentation for a deeper dive into the materialized binary’s components and deployment.