Postgres materialized views are pretty terrible / useless compared to other rdbms. I’ve never found a usecase for the very limited pg version.

In Postgres a materialized view is basically a table that remembers the query used to generate it. Useful if you want to trigger the refreshes without knowing the queries.

I've only used Postgres' and (ages ago) MSSQL's materialized views. What is pg missing compared to the others?

I've found them VERY useful for a narrow range of use cases but, I probably don't realize what I'm missing.

having a dataset refresh on a timer and cache the result for future queries is pretty useful