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Materialize

NEWSLETTER APRIL 2026

Real-time digital twins for the supply chain

At Materialize, we spend a lot of time talking with engineering teams, and they're almost always wrestling with the same core problems. Data is scattered across databases, messaging queues, and third-party platforms, so they rarely have a complete view of what's happening. Processes are batch-based, so by the time they have the data they need, it's already stale. And they're spending time massaging data and wiring systems together, instead of building features that actually matter to customers.

We see this across industries, from financial services and gaming to legal and edtech. But lately, we're seeing this more in manufacturing, distribution, and logistics in particular. Data is scattered across ERPs, warehouse platforms, and transportation management systems, and so the biggest challenge is in bringing it together, and making it live.

Engineering teams are turning to Materialize to bridge that gap, to turn those data silos into real-time views and data products. For example, one company we work with went from week-old inventory snapshots across 8 databases to live views that reflect what's in stock right now. Another cut shipment notification latency from 30 minutes to under 10 seconds. A third started with live freight tracking across 2,600+ trucks but now has four use cases in production, each built on the one before it. These companies now have a real-time digital twin of their operations, and with it, the foundation to power their apps and agents.

It's a space we're excited about. We'll be at MODEX in Atlanta April 13–16, and we're looking forward to discussing this and more with engineering leaders there. If any of this resonates, we'd love to chat more.

-The Materialize Team

🚀 What's New in Materialize

This month's releases focus on getting data in faster, speeding up deploys, and adding source versioning for SQL Server.

S3 and bulk data loading. You can now load CSV and Parquet files directly from Amazon S3. COPY FROM supports both formats from any S3-compatible storage, including Google Cloud Storage, Cloudflare R2, and MinIO. Wherever your data lives, it's now even faster and easier to get it into Materialize.

Faster catalog operations and deploys. Creating views, indexes, and dropping objects is now 37-55% faster, even in environments with hundreds or thousands of objects. Batching multiple operations in a single transaction brings further gains of up to 10%. Blue/green deploys via dbt-materialize now batch readiness checks instead of polling clusters one by one, so you spend less time waiting on deploys and more time building.