My view on views

I love materialised views, if you're pulling information in from another database over a slow network they can be very use full, they avoid having to do a live query on the remote data every time and speed things up for the user.

The problem comes when you have to re sync the data, now you could do this intelligently and only pull in the stuff that has been updated but quite often I do a complete refresh of the view. When doing a refresh sometimes queries can take a long time (5-15 mins) and while this is going on your users can't access the data.

To get over this problem you can refresh your data in a temporary materialised view which is held locally to where you need to use it, this is the bit that takes a long time. Then you can refresh your "live" materialised view with the data in the temporary view meaning that the user experiences almost no downtime.