Forum Discussion

ahmedshalabyy12's avatar
ahmedshalabyy12
Icon for Helper V rankHelper V
1 day ago

Materialized view vs delta tables in gold layer

Hello,

I asked ChatGPT this question, but I got a useless answer from the AI, and it changed its opinion twice during the session. So I decided to ask the experts: from your previous experience, which is better 
Materialized views or delta tables in the gold layer? Both store the physical data, and both can do incremental refresh. But when and why, that's my question.


Thank you 

data engineering
lakehouse

2 Replies

  • v-sathmakuri's avatar
    v-sathmakuri
    Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
    1 day ago

    Hi ahmedshalabyy12​ ,

    Thank you for reaching out to fabric community.

    I would make Delta tables the default choice for the Gold layer, since they offer greater control over transformations, schema, incremental processing, history and reuse across workloads.

    Materialized views are the better fit when the main objective is query performance for example, when pre-aggregating data or streamlining frequently run queries.

    In short, Delta tables should hold the authoritative Gold data, while materialized views serve as performance-optimized derivatives built on top of it.

    Thanks!!

    • ahmedshalabyy12's avatar
      ahmedshalabyy12
      Icon for Helper V rankHelper V
      1 day ago

      Please, if you can, elaborate more with an example since I know delta tables and optimized by Databricks or Fabric