Not exactly. With Clustrix, your application isn't aware of the data partitioning. Instead, the query compiler creates a multi-stage program that forwards tuples from one partition directly to the next, with only the result set coming back to the node the application is connected to. Applications can connect to any node within the cluster and issue queries (usually this is done through a load balancer).

RAW conversion is provided by MacOS if they wanted to go that way. They could easily position themselves as product to handle those cases when the new Photos app isn't enough. This probably won't suffice for a professional workflow, but it might capture a significant portion of the enthusiast market.

We don't support materialized views at the moment, though I can't think of a reason why we couldn't support them if needed. A big strength for our OLAP performance is simply having CPU and memory resources that scale with storage and a query planner that is smart enough to take advantage of those resources.