Incremental Materialized Views in Postgres, Explained
A 3-minute explainer of incremental materialized views: how they work,
why standard Postgres REFRESH breaks at scale, and what Tacnode adds.
Materialized views in Postgres cache the result of a query so reads are
fast — but standard REFRESH is brute force, re-scanning the entire base
table every time. That falls apart as your data grows. Incremental
refresh fixes it by recomputing only what changed. Tacnode supports it
with a single option flag and the full Postgres query surface — joins,
window functions, CTEs, subqueries — plus every DML operation.