Materialize is a streaming database that allows businesses to build a live data layer for their applications and AI agents. It addresses the challenges of traditional OLTP databases struggling with data-intensive queries and data lakehouses lacking freshness for online services. Materialize acts as a speed layer, processing data streams in real-time and enabling users to query fresh, continuously updated data using standard SQL.
It is designed for organizations that need sub-second data freshness for dashboards, real-time analytics, and powering AI agents without the complexity and cost of building and maintaining traditional streaming architectures like Kafka and Spark. Materialize integrates with existing data sources, such as Postgres, and allows users to define transformations using SQL views, making it accessible for data teams already familiar with SQL and tools like dbt. It offers both a fully managed cloud service and self-managed deployment options.
Materialize is ideal for use cases requiring immediate insights, such as real-time customer experience platforms, operational analytics, and powering AI-driven decision-making. It helps reduce the time and resources needed to launch new real-time use cases, providing significant cost savings and enabling faster development cycles for data products.
Materialize is a streaming SQL database that incrementally maintains SQL query results as data changes, enabling real-time applications with standard SQL.
How is Materialize different from PostgreSQL?
Materialize looks like PostgreSQL but maintains query results incrementally in real-time, while PostgreSQL re-computes queries on each execution.
Is Materialize free?
Materialize offers a free trial. Pricing is usage-based starting around $0.30/hour for compute.