Alert Evaluations: Incremental Merges in ClickHouse

A MV is really more like a trigger, which translates an insert into table A into an insert in table B, evaluating, filtering, and grouping each batch of A inserts to determine what rows to insert into B. Those inserts can be grouped by an alert ID in order to segregate the state columns by alert. To me this sounds like exactly what you're doing using manual inserts?

That said, I while MVs are super powerful and convenient, they're a convenience more than a core function. If you have an ingest flow expressed as Go code (as opposed to, say, Vector or Kafka Connect), then you're basically just "lifting" the convenience of MVs into Go code. You don't get the benefit of MV's ability to efficiently evaluate against a batch of inserts (which gives you access to joins and dictionaries and so on), but it's functionally very similar.