Re: Materialized Views

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:36:53 +0100
Michael Riess <mlriess(at)gmx(dot)de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been reading an interesting article which compared different
> database systems, focusing on materialized views. I was wondering how
> the postgresql developers feel about this feature ... is it planned
> to implement materialized views any time soon? They would greatly
> improve both performance and readability (and thus maintainability)
> of my code.
>
> In particular I'm interested in a view which materializes whenever
> queried, and is invalidated as soon as underlying data is changed.

You can already build materialized views in PostgreSQL, but you
end up doing the "heavy lifting" yourself with triggers. You put
insert/update/delete triggers on the underlying tables of your
view that "do the right thing" in your materialized view table.

I wrote a blog entry about this recently,
http://revsys.com/blog/archive/9, where I used a very simple
materialized view to achieve the performance I needed. It has links
to the relevant documentation you'll need however to build triggers
for a more complex situation.

Hope this helps!

---------------------------------
Frank Wiles <frank(at)wiles(dot)org>
http://www.wiles.org
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