Materialize is a streaming database that allows you to process data at speeds and scales not possible in traditional databases, but without the cost, complexity, or development time of most streaming engines. It is a good fit for applications that need to process data in real time, such as fraud detection, anomaly detection, and real-time analytics.
Materialize combines the accessibility of SQL databases with a streaming engine that is horizontally scalable, highly available, and strongly consistent. In particular, it is strong in the following aspects:
Incremental updates. Materialize supports incrementally updated materialized views that are always fresh, even when using complex SQL statements, like multi-way joins with aggregations. Its engine is built on Timely and Differential Dataflow — data processing frameworks backed by many years of research and optimized for this exact purpose. Standard SQL support. Materialize follows the SQL standard (SQL-92) implementation, so you interact with it like any relational database: using SQL. You can build complex analytical workloads using any type of join (including non-windowed joins and joins on arbitrary conditions), but you can also leverage exciting new SQL patterns enabled by streaming like Change Data Capture (CDC), temporal filters, and subscriptions. PostgreSQL wire-compatibility. Materialize uses the PostgreSQL wire protocol, which allows it to integrate out-of-the-box with many SQL clients and other tools in the data ecosystem that support PostgreSQL — like dbt. Strong consistency guarantee. Materialize provides the highest level of transaction isolation: strict serializability. This means that it presents as if it were a single process, despite spanning a large number of threads, processes, and machines. Strict serializability avoids common pitfalls like eventual consistency and dual writes, which affect the correctness of your results. Materialize is a new kind of data warehouse built for operational workloads: the instant your data changes, Materialize reacts.