Comparison
Incremental modelvsMaterialised view
Incremental model
the model rebuilds only the last three days each run instead of the whole four-year table, and once a month you rebuild it fully anyway.
A transformation that processes and appends or merges only new or changed data rather than rebuilding from scratch. It is how a large table stays affordable to maintain, and it introduces the possibility of the incremental result diverging from what a full rebuild would produce. That is why a periodic full refresh is not redundancy but a correctness check, and why teams that never run one eventually cannot explain a discrepancy.
Full entry →Materialised view
you precompute the expensive aggregate into a real table and refresh it on a schedule instead of recomputing it per request.
A stored, physically persisted result of a query, refreshed either on demand or incrementally. It converts a slow read into a fast one and moves the cost to refresh time. Refresh is the whole design problem: a full refresh locks or duplicates the data, and an incremental one needs you to know exactly which inputs changed.
Full entry →