Feature launch: Use your customer data in real-time with the Materialize integration

Customer data now flows in at an unprecedented rate from websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, and more. Harnessing this real-time data is critical if you want to deliver personalized, engaging customer experiences and power data-driven decisions.

But most companies face a tradeoff between flexibility and speed when it comes to managing real-time customer data:

• Streaming data directly to SaaS destinations like marketing tools enables real-time activation but can result in siloed data and limited analytics capabilities and historical visibility.
• Batching data to a traditional cloud data warehouse gives flexibility for analytics but lacks the speed for real-time engagement.

With the RudderStack Materialize destination, you can now get the power of a data warehouse with the speed of real-time streaming, functionally eliminating the tradeoff between flexibility and speed.

Real-time customer data meets the warehouse

With our new Materialize destination integration, you can stream real-time events from RudderStack directly into Materialize – the operational data warehouse. This makes your customer event data available for real-time materialized views, alerts, and analytics within Materialize’s streaming data warehouse.

Key benefits:

• Real-Time analytics & engagement – Materialize’s streaming architecture enables lightning-fast analytics on up-to-the-minute data from RudderStack. Now, you can use your event data to build real-time dashboards, execute alerts based on user behavior, dynamically personalize experiences, and more.
• Unified customer profiles – In Materialize, you can easily join your real-time event data from RudderStack with other real-time data to power complete, unified customer profiles for personalized experiences.
• Flexibility & control – Within Materialize, you have the full flexibility of SQL for modeling, transforming, and analyzing your data. Plus, you maintain complete control and transparency over your customer data because RudderStack routes it directly to Materialize without storing a copy.

How does the integration work?

Starting today, you can stream the firehose of real-time event data from Rudderstack to Materialize using a webhook destination.

This means you can instantly stream all behavioral data from your websites, mobile apps, server-side sources, and even certain cloud apps, like Auth0, to Materialize via RudderStack.

Once your data hits Materialize, you can model, transform, and aggregate it using the same SQL and dbt workflows of an analytical data warehouse – but there’s one major difference.

Instead of relying on the user to set a schedule of batch transformations (e.g., every hour, once a batch update finishes loading in, run a series of SQL queries that build staging tables and marts), Materialize takes the same SQL and runs it continuously as incrementally updated materialized views.

Set up the connection (full documentation here), and you’ll get a continuously updated table of events in Materialize. From there, you can build any number of SQL views that filter, transform, aggregate, and join the data into the shape you need. That’s it! Under the hood, Materialize converts your SQL to dataflows that continuously and incrementally update the results with sub-second latency.

Ultimate optionality

Your customer data, like pageviews, mobile events, product interactions, and changes to accounts, flow from Rudderstack in real-time. However, chances are you don’t need to use all of your data in real time. With RudderStack, you have ultimate optionality.

1. Stream it to Materialize’s operational warehouse – Stream individual events to Materialize to power advanced real-time personalization and alerting experiences.
2. Batch it to a traditional data warehouse – Slow it down to daily or hourly batches and gain the ability to enrich the data with other sources and model it exactly as needed. Plus, manage complexity and control quality with modern version-controlled modeling tools like dbt or cube.dev.
3. Stream it directly to your SaaS tools – Sometimes it’s necessary to stream individual events to specific applications directly to leverage certain capabilities of the destination system.

Enable advanced, real-time use cases

Use Rudderstack and Materialize to centralize complex operational logic in SQL without compromising speed or accuracy. Join your feed of streaming events from Rudderstack to Materialize to unlock advanced use cases for teams that need a real-time operational warehouse.

Advanced business automation

Write complex alerts in SQL that filter across your entire stream of behavioral analytics and join it with your primary application database in real-time to catch bad actors faster, alert your success team to churn risk as it happens, or proactively take action on behalf of your customers to create a better user experience.

Dynamic pricing

Take in a real-time feed of user activity leading up to a checkout process, aggregate and filter it to serve a decision engine that dynamically adjusts pricing based on user intent signals and other outside factors.

Timely, relevant outreach

Join behavioral analytics, outside enrichment, and primary application DB data to generate timely, relevant outreach dynamically. Write a view in Materialize to join high-value user actions with a set of user-centric enrichment to create an “alert table” that a service uses to compose AI-generated outreach.

Use your customer data in real time

Now you can get the flexibility of a data warehouse with the speed of streaming. Use Rudderstack to efficiently route customer event data to Materialize, enabling real-time personalization and custom alerts.

Take advantage of real-time, unified customer profiles with the flexibility and control of SQL. Eliminate the tradeoff between batch and streaming to gain an enterprise-ready solution that delivers value across the customer data pipeline. Reach out to our team to start streaming data to Materialize today.