Hasnain says:

“I don’t know yet if the implementations of this yet are good enough to use at scale. Maybe they’re slow or maybe the bugs aren’t ironed out yet. But obviously it’s possible to build a system that takes an arbitrary declarative, stateless query and does this sort of static analysis and incremental computation behind the scenes, and it should be possible to make it fast and reliable. And if you can make it good, it’s obviously extremely useful. You get to cut out all of that application code that’s dealing with keeping things in sync and make dealing with the stateful data updates someone else’s job. And ideally you can change the performance characteristics (eg: how much to store in memory, whether the result needs to be updated immediately or can be deferred, etc) without rewriting all your code that actually computes the answer.

It’s too good of an idea for it to not succeed. Certainly if I was in charge of databases at AWS, this would be a major tentpole for my roadmap! I figure that a decade from now, most database systems will have a version of this built in.

I can’t wait until they do.”

Posted on 2025-08-24T05:16:52+0000