[frankmcsherry]

I don't think there is anything fundamentally different from an existing database. In all relational databases, some lateral joins can be expensive to compute. In Materialize, those same lateral joins will also be expensive to maintain.

I'd be surprised to hear you beat up postgres or SQL Server because they claim they can evaluate any SQL query, but it turns out that some SQL queries can be expensive. That's all we're talking about here.

[gfody]

I am genuinely interested in Materialize's capability to incrementally maintain views and I understand there are all sorts of limitations as to when that's even possible - I can't find a comprehensive list of them. I don't think it's fair to say you support every possible select statement and then just have some of them be slow. The lateral join case was the first warning I encountered in the docs - is that the ONLY case and every other possible select statement can be incrementally maintained?

[frankmcsherry]

All queries are incrementally maintained with the property that we do work proportional to the number of records in difference at each intermediate stage of the query plan. That includes those with lateral joins; they are not an exception.

I'm not clear on your "all sorts of limitations"; you'll have to fill me in on them?