Incremental Materialization: Reinventing Database Views with Gilad Kleinman of Epsio

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Apr 24, 2025

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ANECDOTE

Gilad's Unique Development Journey

Gilad Kleinman journeyed from PHP backend development to low-level kernel programming.
This diverse experience shaped his perspective on building efficient systems like Epsio.

INSIGHT

Value of Lower System Layers

Lower system layers offer many trade-offs for optimization often unknown at higher levels.
Understanding these options is key to improving performance in applications and databases.

ADVICE

Test Performance Iteratively

Understand theory but prioritize real-world testing and iteration for system performance.
Benchmark micro and real user environments to confirm optimizations before committing.

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Summary

In this episode, Gilad Kleinman, co-founder of Epsio, shares his unique journey from PHP development to low-level kernel programming and how that evolution led him to build an innovative incremental views engine.

Gilad explains that Epsio tackles a common challenge in databases: making heavy, complex queries faster and more efficient through incremental materialization. He describes how traditional materialized views fall short—often requiring full refreshes—and how Epsio seamlessly integrates with existing databases by consuming replication streams (CDC) and writing back to result tables without disrupting the core transactional system.

The conversation dives into the technical trade-offs and optimizations involved, such as handling stateful versus stateless operators (like group-by and window functions), using Rust for performance, and the challenges of ensuring consistency.

Gilad also contrasts Epsio’s approach with streaming systems like Flink, emphasizing that by maintaining tight integration with the native database, Epsio can offer immediate, up-to-date query results while minimizing disruption.

Finally, he outlines his vision for the future of incremental stream processing and materialized views as a means to reduce compute costs and enhance overall system performance.

Chapters

00:00 From PHP to Kernel Development: A Journey
07:30 Introducing Epsio: The Incremental Views Engine
10:56 The Importance of Materialized Views
15:07 Understanding Incremental Materialization
19:21 Optimizing Query Performance with Epsio
24:53 Integrating Epsio with Existing Databases
27:02 The Shift from Theory to Practice in Data Processing
29:42 Seamless Integration with Existing Databases
32:02 Understanding Epsio Incremental Processing Mechanism
34:46 Challenges and Limitations of Incremental Views
36:49 The Complexity of Implementing Operators
39:56 Trade-offs in Incremental Computation
41:21 User Interaction with Epsio
43:01 Comparing EPSIO with Streaming Systems
45:09 Architectural Guarantees of Epsio
50:33 The Future of Incremental Data Processing