When your dashboard takes 10 seconds to load, your users aren’t thinking about how cool your backend architecture is. They’re thinking about moving to a competitor.
The Problem
We had a set of reports that required complex aggregations over millions of rows. Even with indexes, the time to compute these on the fly was unacceptable.
The Solution: Materialized Views
Instead of running the calculation every time a user looked at the screen, we moved the heavy lifting to a background process. By implementing Materialized Views in PostgreSQL and refreshing them on a schedule, we turned a 10-second wait into a 50ms instantaneous experience.
Sometimes, the best way to handle a problem is to avoid doing the work at the moment of request.
> End of field report. Dala Labs.