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Key concepts

Materialize is a streaming database with a SQL API. However, despite the fact that Materialize uses SQL idioms and can process data from databases, it actually has very little in common with “databases” as most people think of them.

In this document, we’ll sketch the conceptual framework expressed by Materialize’s Key Concepts, which might help you develop a mental model of how to work with Materialize and how its components differ from traditional databases.

Materialize offers the following components through its SQL API:

Component Use
Clusters Isolated pools of compute resources for sources, sinks, indexes, materialized views, and queries.
Sources Sources describe an external system you want Materialize to read data from.
Views Views represent queries of sources and other views that you want to save for repeated execution.
Indexes Indexes represent query results stored in memory.
Materialized views Materialized views represent query results stored durably.
Sinks Sinks describe an external system you want Materialize to write data to.

Clusters

Clusters are pools of compute resources (CPU, memory, and, optionally, scratch disk space) for running your workloads.

The following operations require compute resources in Materialize, and so need to be associated with a cluster:

You choose the size of your cluster (small, medium, large, etc.) based on the resource requirements of your workload. Larger clusters have more compute resources available and can therefore process data faster and handle larger data volumes. You can resize a cluster at any time, even while the cluster is running, to respond to changes in your workload.

Clusters provide two important properties:

  • Resource isolation. Workloads on one cluster cannot interfere with workloads on another cluster. You can use multiple clusters to isolate your production workloads from your development workloads, for example.

  • Fault tolerance. You can increase the replication factor of a cluster to increase the number of copies (i.e., replicas) of the cluster that Materialize provisions. Clusters with multiple replicas can tolerate failures of the underlying hardware that cause a replica to become unreachable. As long as one replica of the cluster remains available, the cluster can continue to maintain dataflows and serve queries.

For details about clusters, see CREATE CLUSTER.

Sources

Sources describe external systems you want Materialize to read data from, and provide details about how to decode and interpret that data. A simplistic way to think of this is that sources represent streams and their schemas; this isn’t entirely accurate, but provides an illustrative mental model.

In terms of SQL, sources are similar to a combination of tables and clients.

  • Like tables, sources are structured components that users can read from.
  • Like clients, sources are responsible for reading data. External sources provide all of the underlying data to process.

By looking at what comprises a source, we can develop a sense for how this combination works.

Source components

Sources consist of the following components:

Component Use Example
Connector Provides actual bytes of data to Materialize Kafka
Format Structures of the external source’s bytes, i.e. its schema Avro
Envelope Expresses how Materialize should handle the incoming data + any additional formatting information Upsert

Connectors

Materialize bundles native connectors for the following external systems:

For details on the syntax, supported formats and features of each connector, check out the dedicated CREATE SOURCE documentation pages.

Formats

Materialize can decode incoming bytes of data from several formats:

  • Avro
  • Protobuf
  • Regex
  • CSV
  • Plain text
  • Raw bytes
  • JSON

Envelopes

What Materialize actually does with the data it receives depends on the “envelope” your data provides:

Envelope Action
Append-only Inserts all received data; does not support updates or deletes.
Debezium Treats data as wrapped in a “diff envelope” that indicates whether the record is an insertion, deletion, or update. The Debezium envelope is only supported by sources published to Kafka by Debezium.

For more information, see CREATE SOURCE: Kafka—Using Debezium.
Upsert Treats data as having a key and a value. New records with non-null value that have the same key as a preexisting record in the dataflow will replace the preexisting record. New records with null value that have the same key as preexisting record will cause the preexisting record to be deleted.

For more information, see CREATE SOURCE: —Handling upserts

Sinks

Sinks are the inverse of sources and represent a connection to an external stream where Materialize outputs data. When a user defines a sink over a materialized view, source, or table, Materialize automatically generates the required schema and writes down the stream of changes to that view or source. In effect, Materialize sinks act as change data capture (CDC) producers for the given source or view.

Currently, Materialize only supports sending sink data to Kafka. See the Kafka sink documentation for details.

Views

In SQL, views represent a query that you save with some given name. These are used primarily as shorthand for some lengthy, complicated SELECT statement. Materialize uses the idiom of views similarly, but the implication of views is fundamentally different.

Materialize offers the following types of views:

Type Use
Materialized views Incrementally updated views whose results are persisted in durable storage
Non-materialized views Queries saved under a name for reference, like traditional SQL views

All views in Materialize are built by reading data from sources and other views.

Materialized views

Materialized views embed a query like a traditional SQL view, but—unlike a SQL view—compute and incrementally update the results of this embedded query. The results of a materialized view are persisted in durable storage, which allows you to effectively decouple the computational resources used for view maintenance from the resources used for query serving.

Materialize accomplishes incremental updates by creating a set of persistent transformations—known as a “dataflow”—that represent the query’s output. As new data comes in from sources, it’s fed into materialized views that query the source. Materialize then incrementally updates the materialized view’s output by understanding what has changed in the data, based on the source’s envelope. Any changes to a view’s output are then propagated to materialized views that query it, and the process repeats.

When reading from a materialized view, Materialize simply returns the dataflow’s current result set from durable storage. To improve the speed of queries on materialized views, we recommend creating indexes based on common query patterns.

See CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW for details about materialized views.

Non-materialized views

Non-materialized views simply store a verbatim query and provide a shorthand for performing the query.

Unlike materialized views, non-materialized views do not store the results of their embedded queries. The results of a view can be incrementally maintained in memory within a cluster by creating an index. This allows you to serve queries without the overhead of materializing the view.

See CREATE VIEW for details about non-materialized views.

Indexes

Indexes assemble and maintain a query’s results in memory within a cluster, which provides future queries the data they need in a format they can immediately use.

These continually updated indexes are known as arrangements within Materialize’s dataflows. In the simplest case, the arrangement is the last operator and simply stores the query’s output in memory. In more complex cases, arrangements let Materialize perform sophisticated operations like joins more efficiently.

For a deeper dive into how indexes work, see Arrangements.

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