Materialized views are obviously useful

https://sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/materialized-views-are-obviously-useful

by gz09 • 11 months ago

173 78 11 months ago

erulabs2• 11 months ago

What a great post. Humble and honest and simple and focused on an issue most developers think is so simple (“why not just vibe code SQL?”, “whatever, just scale up the RDS instance”).

Compliments aside, where this article stops is where things get exciting. Postgres shines here, as does Vitess, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, even MongoDB has materialized views now. Vitess and Scylla are so good, it’s a shame they’re not more popular among smaller startups!

What I haven’t seen yet is a really good library for managing materialized views.

malthejorgensen• 11 months ago

Don’t you have to manually “refresh” Postgres materialized views, essentially making it an easier to implement cache (the Redis example in the blog post) rather than the type always-auto-updating materialized view the blog post author is actually touting?

lbreakjai• 11 months ago

Out of the box, you're right, but there are extensions that do just that:

https://github.com/sraoss/pg_ivm

It's however not available on RDS, so I've never had the chance to try it myself.

ropable2• 11 months ago

Yes, you need to refresh the materialized views periodically. Which mean that, just like any other caching mechanism, you're solving one problem (query performance) but introducing another (cache invalidation). I've personally used Postgres MVs to great success, but there are tradeoffs.

striking• 11 months ago

The real bummer is not that you have to manually refresh them, it's that refreshing them involves refreshing the entire view. If you could pick and choose what gets refreshed, you might just sometimes have a stale cache here and there while parts of it get updated. But refreshing a materialized view that is basically just not small or potentially slightly interesting runs the risk of blowing your write instance up.

For this reason I would strongly advise, in the spirit of https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This, that you Don't Do Materialized Views.

Sure, Differential/Timely Dataflow exist and they're very interesting; I have not gotten to build a database system with them and the systems that provide them in a usable format to end users (e.g. Materialize) are too non-boring for me to want to deploy in a production app.

recroad• 11 months ago

So the author is wrong that they’re automatic kept in sync?

erulabs2• 11 months ago

Oh interesting, I didn’t know that - I’ve been so far in MySQL/Vitess land for so long, I haven’t used Postgres in several years. That’s disappointing!

nine_k• 11 months ago

I think it's impossible to do an incremental update in an arbitrary case. Imagine an m-view based on a query that selects top 100 largest purchases during last 30 days on an e-commerce site. Or, worse, a query that selects the largest subtree of followers on a social network site.

Only certain kinds of conditions, such as a rolling window over a timestamp field, seem amenable to efficient incremental updates. What am I missing?

enedil• 11 months ago

Materialized views in ScyllaDB are (were?) known to be a buggy implementation. In particular, they often depended on the cluster being healthy at the time of propagating the changes.

bdcravens• 11 months ago

In lieu of good MV support, you can always just run a scheduled query to store results in a persisted table that you identify as a materialized view. For example, when doing this in SQL Server, I give the table name a "cache" prefix.

quectophoton• 11 months ago

And then by magic the results of this query will just always exist and be up-to-date.

With PostgreSQL the materialized view won't be automatically updated though, you need to do `REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW` manually.

4ndrewl2• 11 months ago

Just landed here to write this. Materialized Views are _very_ implementation specific and are definitely _not_ magic.

It's important to understand how your implementation works before committing to it.

shivasaxena• 11 months ago

Curious if anyone know any implementation where they would be automatically updated?

Now that would be awesome!

EDIT: come to think of it, it would require going through CDC stream, and figuring out if any of the tables affected are a dependency of given materialized view. Maybe with some ast parsing as well to handle tenants/partitions. Sounds like it can work?

dalyons• 11 months ago

Postgres materialized views are pretty terrible / useless compared to other rdbms. I’ve never found a usecase for the very limited pg version.

thrown-0825• 11 months ago

having a dataset refresh on a timer and cache the result for future queries is pretty useful

JohnBooty• 11 months ago

I've only used Postgres' and (ages ago) MSSQL's materialized views. What is pg missing compared to the others?

I've found them VERY useful for a narrow range of use cases but, I probably don't realize what I'm missing.

globular-toast2• 11 months ago

In Postgres a materialized view is basically a table that remembers the query used to generate it. Useful if you want to trigger the refreshes without knowing the queries.

jelder2• 11 months ago

Did I miss in the article where OP reveals the magic database that actually does this?

3rd party solutions like https://readyset.io/ and https://materialize.com/ exist specifically because databases don’t actually have what we all want materialized views to be.

sophiebits3• 11 months ago

These startups (and a handful of others) are what I meant!

rapind• 11 months ago

You can do targeted materialized view updates via triggers. It's definitely verbose but does give you a lot of control.

I'm currently parking PostgREST behind Fastly (varnish) for pretty much the same benefits plus edge CDNs for my read APIs. I really just use materialized views for report generation now.

anon848736283• 11 months ago

In the analytics world, BigQuery MVs seem pretty cool. You can tune the freshness parameters, it will maintain user-specific row-level security, and even rewrite regular queries to use the pre-computed aggregates if possible.

But I don't think there is anything similar in the GCP transactional db options like Spanner or CloudSQL.

oftenwrong• 11 months ago

There is a PostgreSQL extension that adds support for incremental updates to materialised views: https://github.com/sraoss/pg_ivm

Jupe• 11 months ago

(Technically speaking, if 100 people load the same page at the same time and the cache isn’t populated yet, then we’ll end up sending 100 queries to the database which isn’t amazing, but let’s just pretend we didn’t hear that.)

Isn't their tech to address that, like golang's "singleflight"?

bob1029• 11 months ago

I don’t know yet if the implementations of this yet are good enough to use at scale. Maybe they’re slow or maybe the bugs aren’t ironed out yet.

This technique is very well supported in the big commercial engines. In MSSQL's Indexed View case, the views are synchronously updated when the underlying tables are modified. This has implications at insert/update/delete time, so if you are going to be doing a lot of these you might want to do it on a read replica to avoid impact to production writes.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/v...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/creat...

sophiebits3• 11 months ago

TIL, thanks! I know Postgres and MySQL don’t include an equivalent.

MangoToupe2• 11 months ago

Can we inspect MSSQL's source or is it shipped as a blob? I can't find any serious information about how this works. I can't imagine who would want to spend money on this.

mike_hearn• 11 months ago

Yes the idea it's newfangled is odd. It's only newfangled if you ignore the existence of database engines that are better than the open source ones.

Oracle's implementation scales horizontally and can do incremental view maintenance using commit logs:

https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/materialized-views

But it may not even be necessary because Oracle also supports query caching both server and client side. By default you have to opt-in on the query level:

    SELECT /*+ RESULT_CACHE */ .... FROM .....

but if you do then queries might not even hit the database at all, the results are cached by the drivers. The main limitation of that feature is that it's meant for read-mostly tables and cache keys are invalidated on any write to the table. So for aggregating counts in a large multi-tenant table the hit rate would be low and a materialized view is more appropriate.

It's a bit unclear why the author of the article ignores triggers as not "in vogue" though. That's supported by every DB and will work fine for this use case. You do have to learn how to use these features but it can save a lot of work, especially when introducing non-consistent data sources like a Redis cache. Consistency is so valuable.

Disclosure: work for Oracle, opinions are my own (albeit in this case, presumably highly aligned).

porridgeraisin2• 11 months ago

In general counts are just so commonly needed in 1:N relationships. Specifically counts grouped by "status" of the object on the N side of the relationship. I've never seen a CRUD app where this didn't eventually make the feature list.

So I just pre-emptively break "normal form" and maintain counts in the database right from the start. I either update it with multiple stmts everytime in a txn, or with triggers. In sqlite I prefer triggers mostly because I know the operation and edge cases of sqlite trigger impl better than I know other DBs'.

Caching can just be invalidation-based in this case.

mkleczek• 11 months ago

That way you increase contention and harm scalability. In sqlite it does not matter as writes are single-threaded anyway. But in other DBMSes it does. What's more: in PostgreSQL you increase bloat as every update creates a new row version.

Most of the times the solution is not pre-aggregation but proper indexes on foreign key columns (missing fk indexes is one of the most common mistakes in RDB design).

the_sleaze_• 11 months ago

I have to admit I do the same as GP here. However I would always do both - index and keep a count on the parent as a first step.

increase contention and harm scalability

Contention, concurrent connections, high-throughput and the associated race conditions are absolute table stakes for RDBMs. They just won't be taken seriously if they can't handle thousands of concurrent updates. So imho for 90% of projects this just won't be an issue.

PostgreSQL you increase bloat as every update creates a new row version

This is true, but the complexity has to live somewhere. There will be as many rows added to a materialized view as there will be in the original table.

Most of the times the solution is not pre-aggregation

This is wrong. Caching = pre-aggregation and is almost always either the solution or a part of the solution to scalability, latancy etc. Don't compute what you can retrieve.

porridgeraisin2• 11 months ago

Yeah if index + count(*) works fine, then that is enough. This will usually not be a purely index-only scan though in practice, in MVCC databases. Since it sometimes has to inspect the actual row to see if its visible to the current transaction or not. So it's "mostly" an index scan. If you're not getting an index-only scan, count(*) can become a bottleneck in my experience even with FK indexes.

[All just my understanding]

wavemode• 11 months ago

This shouldn't require denormalization. `SELECT COUNT(*)` ought to be very fast if you have a foreign key index.

lblume• 11 months ago

Denormalization in order to improve performance like this does not seem like the right tradeoff to me. You are making the database much less robust, and anomalies much more likely, in what should be as simple as what the original post mentions.

thom2• 11 months ago

Materialize.com and Snowflake have pretty reliable incremental materialised views now, with caveats that aren’t back breaking. If you can transform in SQL rather than having to build a whole new pipeline or microservice to do the work that’s a pure operational win. I consider this alongside hybrid transactional/analytical databases to be the holy grail of data infrastructure. Finally we can stop just shuffling data around, support almost all workloads in one place, and get some work done.

viccis• 11 months ago

Yep Databricks does this pretty well too. I think their sales jargon for it is the "Enzyme engine"

MangoToupe2• 11 months ago

Finally we can stop just shuffling data around

Bro that's your entire job description. What is left?

thom2• 11 months ago

Deciding what colour it should be.

jmull• 11 months ago

I curious why an index can't handle that first query well.

th0ma5• 11 months ago

This is my thing, I often thought of these views as a way to bridge organizational divides rather than technical ones. Still cool! But if you own everything you can do all kinds of other stuff just as easily.

mb7733• 11 months ago

Indexes can only help narrow down to the issues for the project (more generally: matching rows for the query). Once the index narrows down the rows, Postgres still has to count them all, and Postgres isn't particularly fast at that, especially in an active table[0]. That's what the author meant by 'complete index scan of the tasks for the project'.

Of course this isn't really relevant until there are a very large number of rows to count for a given query. Much larger than what is likely for "tasks in a project". I've run into this only with queries that end up counting 10e7/8/9 rows, i.e. more like OLAP workloads

[0] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Slow_Counting

crazygringo• 11 months ago

There is no reason. An index is the proper solution for dealing with <1K tasks per project, conservatively. (On modern SSD's you'd probably still be plenty fast for <100K tasks.)

In fact, the query would return the result straight from counting the project_id index entries, never even needing to scan the table itself (as the author acknowledges).

If you're really dealing with many, many thousands of tasks per project, then materialized views are going to be just as slow to update as to view. They're not "magic". The standard performant solution would be to keep a num_tasks field that was always incremented or decremented in a transaction together with inserting or deleting a task row. That will actually be lightning fast.

Materialized views aren't even supported in many common relational databases. They're a very particular solution that has very particular tradeoffs. Unfortunately, this article doesn't go into the tradeoffs at all, and picks a bad example where they're not even an obviously good solution in the first place.

jamesblonde5• 11 months ago

This triggered me in the article

'There are a few startups these days peddling a newfangled technology called “incremental view maintenance” or “differential dataflow”. '

Incremental view maintenance can change recomputation cost of view updates from O(N) to O(1). DBSP is based on z-sets, a generalization of relational algebra. The paper won best paper at SIGMOD. There is a startup, Feldera, commercializing it.

This is just ignorance to dismiss as 'new fangled'.

PerryStyle• 11 months ago

+1. Learned about this in DB research course during grad school. Feldera is really cool.

Also I love their website design.

lsuresh2• 11 months ago

Thanks for the kind words (Feldera co-founder here). I'll pass it on to the design team. :)

anon848736283• 11 months ago

I mean, everything you said sounds exactly like the definition of "new fangled" to me. I don't think the term is meant to be so pejorative or dismissive, just that the tech is currently intimidating to people not on the cutting edge. (Edit: e.g. taking graduate level database courses, as mentioned by a sibling comment :-)

There is constantly so much new stuff in software, you have to be a bit willfully ignorant of some things some of the time.

jamesblonde5• 11 months ago

Does going from O(N) to O(1) sound like "new fangled"? That is the smell of progress

tylerhou• 11 months ago

IVM is not new, but the DBSP (2022) perspective is relatively new for databases (where the classic literature is from the 70s and 80s).

It is misleading to say that IVM reduces the cost of view updates from O(n) to O(1). While that is not technically incorrect, for any nontrivial query (e.g anything with an index join) the cost of a view update will be smaller than the original query but not constant time.

Also, the tone of “newfangled” was not dismissive in the context of an article praising IVM. At worst, it was sarcastic; I interpreted it as teasing.

I do research related to IVM / DBSP.

lysergic• 11 months ago

Here are some commercial and source-available options:

I'm not affiliated with any of these names, I'm just really interested in IVM:

Materialize Readyset Feldera RisingWave

globular-toast2• 11 months ago

This is a weird article. The author doesn't even mention what database they are talking about then just drops in some SQL that looks like Postgres. If you think Postgres will magically have the right values in it for a materialized view you will be very disappointed...

quasarj• 11 months ago

Yeah, that was my thoughts as well. What database is this? In Postgres you definitely have to update materialized views manually....

xixixao• 11 months ago

Convex's queries[0] are another example, with perhaps a somewhat simpler approach to the tracking and invalidation.

[0] https://stack.convex.dev/how-convex-works

aboodman• 11 months ago

FYI, Zero uses incremental view maintenance internally as the core of its sync engine:

https://zero.rocicorp.dev/docs/introduction

IVM is what allows the core feature of our DX: that users can just do a fairly large query with sorts and joins, like:

  zero.query.posts.where('authorID', 42)
    .orderBy('created', 'desc')
    .limit(1000)
    .related('comments',
      c => c.orderBy('created', 'desc').limit(10))

... and we sync updates to this query incrementally to the client.

TanStack DB also uses IVM, but only client-side currently.

If you are interested in such things, you can take a poke around the source here: https://github.com/rocicorp/mono/tree/main/packages/zql. Or come find us in Discord: https://discord.rocicorp.dev/

wslh• 11 months ago

A 2020 HN thread on differential dataflow and some comments about materialized views: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837031

Aeolun• 11 months ago

This is like React or SolidJS for database queries.

joaomacp• 11 months ago

[After just using `count()`]

Uh oh, someone is tapping you on the shoulder and saying this is too slow because it has to do a complete index scan of the tasks for the project, every time you load the page

Just ask them if that's actually the bottleneck and go for a walk outside, before sweating over anything else discussed in this post.

ropable2• 11 months ago

Materialized views are great and (obviously) useful, but they have the usual tradeoffs of any caching mechanism (e.g. now you have to worry about cache data age and invalidation.

IMO a slept-on database feature is table partitioning to improve query performance. If you have a frequently-used filter field that you can partition on (e.g. creation timestamp), then you can radically improve query performance of large databases by having the DB only need to full-scan the given partitions. The database itself manages where records are placed, so there is no additional overhead complexity beyond initial setup. I've only used this for PostgreSQL, but I assume that other databases have similar partition mechanisms.

npn• 11 months ago

This is silly. The proper way is to keep a task_count field on projects table and update it on create/delete action. Way more flexible and perfomant.

hyperadvanced• 11 months ago

I don’t want to be rude, but this is a bad use case for materialized views, and does not provide an adequate technical solution to the problems discussed.

A better, canonical use case for matviews is subdividing the projects table into project-tasks-reporting by month by customer by market vertical, or what have you.

All said, still not a massive needle-mover

Terr_• 11 months ago

This lineup makes my think of "Read Models" on an event-driven system.

Of course, that assumes you somehow have an event when interesting things change, and that you've gone through the effort of figuring out how you want to record (or update the record) for later.

garyclarke27• 11 months ago

I love Postgres but my biggest disappointment with them over recent years, is they are still missing automatic incremental materialized view maintenance. Has been proposed for many years but never implemented, there are extensions but they are not popular which makes me weary to use them. Would be so nice to have in the core, would also be nice to have an explanation as to why they can't do it?? Oracle has had this for many years.

whalesalad• 11 months ago

At least for Postgres, this won't work the way the author describes.

And then by magic the results of this query will just always exist and be up-to-date. You can just query it and it’s instant;

This is not true of a materialized view, which needs to be refreshed after changes. PostgreSQL does not support incremental refresh out of the box, so you must refresh the entire view. A standard view would be "magically" up to date, as it is going to defer execution to runtime.

Materialized views are obviously useful

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