[iTokio]

Is this feature even possible? How can the database unravel a complex queries with derived data to minimal updates from its normalized parts?

The easy way is to rebuild everything if any “from table” as been modified.

The manual way is to create triggers that perform the minimal updates.

[benjaminwootton]

There are lots of projects who have managed to achieve this.

Streaming frameworks like Kafka Streams and Flink have incrementally updating tables in memory.

Materialize is built around the concept with a Postgres compatible API.

ClickHouse materialized views act like insert triggers which update when the base table is updated.

[pgwhalen]

I'm not familiar with ClickHouse materialized views, but the other tech you list (as I roughly understand them) seem more concerned with streaming SQL, which is a related but different end user experience from incrementally refreshed materialized views.

[shpongled]

I believe differential data flow techniques (Materialize, Noria) enable this kind of stuff