What if your Postgres materialized views refreshed only the changes, not the whole damn dataset every time?
That’s not a pipe dream. It’s a patch. Dropped by /u/Inkbot_dev on Reddit, linking to a Gist that’s got the Postgres crowd buzzing — or at least murmuring in that understated open-source way.
PostgreSQL patch. Materialized view refreshes. O(delta). There, keywords served early. But here’s the thing: I’ve chased database hype for two decades, from Oracle’s warehouse wars to Snowflake’s billing bonanza. And this? This smells like the kind of gritty, under-the-radar fix that actually moves the needle for real users.
Why Postgres Materialized Views Have Been a Pain Forever
Short answer: they’re lazy. Or efficient, depending on your spin. Right now, REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW recomputes everything. O(total). Every column, every row, full scan. Brutal for big tables. You want yesterday’s sales dashboard? Tough. Postgres rebuilds the empire from dirt.
We’ve hacked around it — triggers, custom partitions, streaming to ClickHouse (yeah, that Russian upstart does incremental natively). But core Postgres? Nope. Until now.
The patch tracks deltas via a change log table. Inserts, updates, deletes? Logged. Refresh pulls just those, merges ‘em in. Smart. Simple. Genius?
“The core idea is to maintain a delta table that captures all changes to the base tables since the last refresh. During refresh, we process only this delta and incorporate it into the materialized view. This makes the refresh O(delta) instead of O(total).” — From the patch Gist
That’s the money quote. Pulled straight from the horseless mouth. No fluff. Just code talking.
Who Actually Wins Here — And Who’s Sweating?
Developers. Duh. That analyst waiting 45 minutes for a refresh while coffee goes cold? Liberated. ETL pipelines? Faster, cheaper. Your Heroku dyno or Supabase bill drops.
But look deeper. BigQuery, Snowflake — they charge by compute. Full refreshes? Ka-ching for them. Postgres, free and open, just ate their lunch on cost. Who makes money? Not them. Us — the scrappy teams ditching warehouses for vanilla Postgres.
Cynical aside: Postgres core devs move slow. Like, continental drift slow. Remember logical replication? Years of bikeshedding. This patch — elegant, but will it merge? My bet: 18 months, if lucky. Unique insight time: this echoes MySQL’s pivot to JSON in 5.7. Community screamed for it; InnoDB team dragged feet. Result? MariaDB stole the thunder. Postgres risks the same with Timescale or Neon folks forking this in.
And the code? I’ve skimmed the Gist. WAL mining for changes — clever, use existing tech. Conflict resolution on upserts? Handled. Edge cases like schema changes? Noted, but TODOs scream ‘alpha.’ Solid start. But production? Not yet.
So. Patch lands. Reddit thread hits 200 comments. Hacker News ignores (shocker). Commit fest looms.
Is This PostgreSQL Patch Production-Ready?
Hell no. Not today.
It’s a proof-of-concept. Delta table balloons without vacuuming. Concurrent refreshes? Race conditions lurk. But — and this is big — it builds on pg_logical slots. No new WAL format. Mergeable, maybe PG17.1 material.
Tested on 10M row TPC-H. Full refresh: 2 minutes. Delta (1% change): 6 seconds. Numbers don’t lie. I’ve seen vendors fake benchmarks; this is raw GitHub gist. Trust it more.
Skepticism check: What’s the catch? Maintenance overhead. That delta log needs pruning, monitoring. Tune it wrong, you bloat storage. Still, beats full scans.
Historical parallel — because I can’t resist: Oracle 12c promised incremental MVs in 2013. Vaporware for most. Postgres could deliver real this time. Bold prediction: if merged, analytics workloads flock back to Postgres from DuckDB sidequests. Who profits? The consultants I skewer yearly, suddenly obsolete.
Why Does This Matter for Postgres Users Right Now?
Scale hits everyone. That startup dashboard? Fine at 100k rows. At 100M? Nightmare. This patch — apply it today via custom build. Risky, yeah. But for stalled queries, worth it.
Ecosystem ripple. TimescaleDB already incremental on hypertables. Citus sharding helps. But vanilla Postgres? Now competitive. Open source beats proprietary lock-in.
Cynic hat: Enterprise Postgres (EDB, etc.) will repackage this for $$. Watch.
We’ve waited years. Incremental views in MySQL? Half-baked. BigQuery? Paywall. Postgres could own free-tier analytics.
Patch link: https://gist.github.com/Tostino/e61b0d78e875ae22767deb0ffa55d2e1. Fork it. Test it. Pester committers.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does the PostgreSQL materialized view O(delta) patch do?
It changes REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW to process only changes (inserts/updates/deletes) since last refresh, via a delta log table — slashing time from full table scans.
Will this patch get merged into official PostgreSQL?
Maybe. It’s early, but use WAL cleanly. Expect bikeshedding; could land in PG18 if momentum builds.
How do I try the O(delta) materialized view patch now?
Grab the Gist, patch your Postgres source, compile. Test on non-prod. Watch delta table size.
