Do you happen to have any examples of real-time queries or apps you would be interested in?
Re: the second point — you’re right, Materialize has historically leveraged existing upstream systems (like Kafka) for things like persistence. But we also hear you loud and clear that not everyone wants to stand up Kafka :)
Yeah, I think there's a tremendous amount of use cases for Materialize for companies that already have data store infra and want real time analytics or such use cases.
However, I also think differential dataflow solves a big problem for smaller companies building out their MVP or in early-stages. Firebase is popular because it's easy to set up, and it's realtime functionality on the client side mean you don't need to write a client-side data management layer, you can just use firebase's realtime functionality.
The issue is that firebase is completely untyped, isn't relational, and has limited queries. So you end up writing gnarly non-transactional code that makes many round-trip requests to query basic stuff.
I think there may be an opportunity product that combines the performance of and client-side tools of firestore, the ease of use of airtable and the real-time query and materialized view functionality of materialize into a database platform for businesses that want to scale their product.
Big ask obviously, but I know that a product like that would help me launch products much faster, I'd pay a lot for it.
Re: the second point — you’re right, Materialize has historically leveraged existing upstream systems (like Kafka) for things like persistence. But we also hear you loud and clear that not everyone wants to stand up Kafka :)