doc/user/content/concepts/_index.md
The pages in this section introduces some of the key concepts in Materialize:
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Reaction Time | Measures how quickly a system can reflect a change in input data and return an up-to-date query result. Defined as the sum of data freshness and query latency. |
| Clusters | Clusters are isolated pools of compute resources for sources, sinks, indexes, materialized views, and ad-hoc queries. |
| Sources | Sources describe an external system you want Materialize to read data from. |
| Views | Views represent a named query that you want to save for repeated execution. You can use indexed views and materialized views to incrementally maintain the results of views. |
| Indexes | Indexes represent query results stored in memory. |
| Sinks | Sinks describe an external system you want Materialize to write data to. |
Refer to the individual pages for more information.