  We overview recent progress on the longstanding problem of incremental view
maintenance (IVM), with a focus on the fine-grained complexity and optimality
of IVM for classes of conjunctive queries. This theoretical progress guided the
development of IVM engines that reported practical benefits in academic papers
and industrial settings. When taken in isolation, each of the reported
advancements is but a small increment. Yet when taken together, they may well
pave the way to a deeper understanding of the IVM problem.
  This paper accompanies the invited Gems of PODS 2024 talk with the same
title. Some of the works highlighted in this paper are based on prior or
on-going collaborations with: Ahmet Kara, Milos Nikolic, and Haozhe Zhang in
the F-IVM project; and Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Niko G\"obel, Hung Ngo, and Dan
Suciu at RelationalAI.
