Maybe I'm biased because I'm such a huge Frank McSherry fanboy. The differential dataflow work he does in rust is simply awesome, and he writes great papers too!

Little known fun fact, the rust type- and borrow-checker uses a datalog engine internally to express typing rules, and that engine was written and improved by Frank McSherry. So whenever you hit compile on a rust program, you're using a tiny bit of Materialize tech.

I ignored them for a long time because of it. I just assumed they were lightweights being annoying because they didn't have anything else.

It serves as anti-marketing, at least to me.