Materialize

Materialize is a verb meaning to cause to appear in a tangible form, or to become real or actual. It is used both literally, as in turning potential into matter, and figuratively, as in plans or dreams that materialize. The word derives from Latin materialis via French, and has been in English since the Middle Ages.

In physics, materialization refers to the conversion of energy into matter, such as particle-antiparticle pair production, where sufficient energy is transformed into particles. In everyday language, "materialize" can describe a plan, a vision, or an object becoming visible or present.

Materialized views are a database concept in which the results of a query are precomputed and stored physically. Unlike a regular view, a materialized view occupies storage and can speed up repeated queries, at the cost of keeping storage and refreshing the data when the underlying source data changes. Refresh strategies include complete, incremental, or on-demand, and are common in data warehousing and enterprise databases.

Materialize also refers to a modern streaming database and platform named Materialize. It provides real-time, incremental computation of SQL queries over data streams. Built on the Timely dataflow framework, it maintains materialized views of streaming data to support low-latency analytics and dashboards. The product emphasizes a SQL interface, composable views, and automatic incremental maintenance, and is distributed as open-source software with commercial offerings.