flink-statefun VS materialize

When low latency matters you should always consider an ETL approach rather than ELT, e.g. collect data in Kafka and process using Kafka Streams/Flink in Java or Quix Streams/Bytewax in Python, then sink it to Snowflake where you can handle non-critical workloads (as is the case for 99% of BI/analytics). This way you can choose the right path for your data depending on how quickly it needs to be served.

Sometimes we may need to generate random data of type 2 in different streams, so the "coherency" must also spread across different entities, think for example to referential integrity in databases. If I am generating users, products and orders to three different Kafka topics and I want to create a streaming application with Apache Flink, I definitely need data to be coherent across topics.

The Treatment and Control audiences need to be stored for future low-latency, high-reliability retrieval. Retrieval happens when we are delivering the survey, and informs the system which users to send surveys to. How is this achieved at Reddit’s scale? Users interact with ads, which generate events that are sent to our downstream systems for processing. At the output, these interactions are stored in DynamoDB as engagement records for easy access. Records are indexed on user ID and ad campaign ID to allow for efficient retrieval. The use of stream processing (Apache Flink) ensures this whole process happens within minutes, and keeps audiences up to date in real-time. The following high-level diagram summarizes the process:

Most streaming database technologies use SQL for these reasons: RisingWave, Materialize, KsqlDB, Apache Flink, and so on offering SQL interfaces. This post explains how to choose the right streaming database.

Apache Flink.

There are different ways to implement parallel dataflows, such as using parallel data processing frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink, or using cloud-based services like Amazon EMR and Google Cloud Dataflow. It is also possible to use parallel dataflow frameworks to handle big data and distributed computing, like Apache Nifi and Apache Kafka.

We’re not discussing the technical details behind the deduplication process. It could be Apache Flink, Apache Spark, or Kafka Streams. Anyway, it’s out of the scope of this article.

One can also consider https://flink.apache.org/ instead of Kafka for connecting a large number of devices.

Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing frameworks. You could use them to build streaming applications with stateful information, sliding windows, etc.

[2] https://materialize.com/

To fully leverage the data is the new oil concept, companies require a special database designed to manage vast amounts of data instantly. This need has led to different database forms, including NoSQL databases, vector databases, time-series databases, graph databases, in-memory databases, and in-memory data grids. Recent years have seen the rise of cloud-based streaming databases such as RisingWave, Materialize, DeltaStream, and TimePlus. While they each have distinct commercial and technical approaches, their overarching goal remains consistent: to offer users cloud-based streaming database services.

> Materialize no longer provide the latest code as an open-source software that you can download and try. It turned from a single binary design to cloud-only micro-service

Materialize CTO here. Just wanted to clarify that Materialize has always been source available, not OSS. Since our initial release in 2020, we've been licensed under the Business Source License (BSL), like MariaDB and CockroachDB. Under the BSL, each release does eventually transition to Apache 2.0, four years after its initial release.

Our core codebase is absolutely still publicly available on GitHub [0], and our developer guide for building and running Materialize on your own machine is still public [1].

It is true that we substantially rearchitected Materialize in 2022 to be more "cloud-native". Our new cloud offering offers horizontal scalability and fault tolerance—our two most requested features in the single-binary days. I wouldn't call the new architecture a microservices design though! There are only 2-3 services, each quite substantial, in the new architecture (loosely: a compute service, an orchestration service, and, soon, a load balancing service).

We do push folks to sign up for a free trial of our hosted cloud offering [2] these days, rather than trying to start off by running things locally, as we generally want folks' first impression of Materialize to be of the version that we support for production use cases. A all-in-one single machine Docker image does still exist, if you know where to look, but it's very much use-at-your-own-risk, and we don't recommend using it for anything serious, but it's there to support e.g. academic work that wants to evaluate Materialize's capabilities to incrementally maintain recursive SQL queries.

If folks have questions about Materialize, we've got a lively community Slack [3] where you can connect directly with our product and engineering teams.

[0]: https://github.com/MaterializeInc/materialize/tree/main

Some recent solutions to this problem include Differential Dataflow and Materialize. It would be neat if postgres adopted something similar for live-updating materialized views.

https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow

https://materialize.com/

Materialize | Full-Time | NYC Office or Remote | https://materialize.com

Materialize is an Operational Data Warehouse: A cloud data warehouse with streaming internals, built for work that needs action on what’s happening right now. Keep the familiar SQL, keep the proven architecture of cloud warehouses but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date.

Materialize is the operational data warehouse built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products: Fresh, Correct, Scalable — all in a familiar SQL UI.

Senior/Staff Product Manager - https://grnh.se/69754ebf4us

Senior Frontend Engineer - https://grnh.se/7010bdb64us

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Investors include Redpoint, Lightspeed and Kleiner Perkins.

Materialize | EM (Compute), Senior PM | New York, New York | https://materialize.com/

You shouldn't have to throw away the database to build with fast-changing data. Keep the familiar SQL, keep the proven architecture of cloud warehouses, but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date.

That is Materialize, the only true SQL streaming database built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products: Fresh, Correct, Scalable — all in a familiar SQL UI.

Engineering Manager, Compute - https://grnh.se/4e14099f4us

Senior Product Manager - https://grnh.se/587c36804us

VP of Marketing - https://grnh.se/9caac4b04us

How does it compare to https://materialize.com/ ?