Abstract
We overview recent progress on the longstanding problem of incremental view maintenance (IVM), with a focus on the fine-grained complexity and optimality of IVM for classes of conjunctive queries. This theoretical progress is accompanied by efforts that show its benefits in practical settings. When taken in isolation, each of the reported advancements is but a small increment. Yet when taken together, they may well pave the way to a deeper understanding of the IVM problem.
This paper accompanies the invited Gems of PODS 2024 talk with the same title. Some of the works highlighted in this paper are based on prior and on-going collaborations with: Ahmet Kara, Milos Nikolic, and Haozhe Zhang from the F-IVM project at University of Edinburgh and University of Zurich; and Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Niko Goebels, Hung Ngo, and Dan Suciu from RelationalAI and University of Washington.
Olteanu, Dan