Materialized views (Was Re: Improving count(*))

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Alvaro,
>
>> I guess there must be a query-rewriting mechanism for implementing
>> materialized views.  With that in place we may be able to implement this
>> other thing ...  Is anybody working on materialized views?
>
> I have a bundle of academic code designed to do exactly this, if any hacker
> wants to take on the task of getting it into production shape.

Could you post it to the list? I'd be interested to take a look, though 
I'm afraid don't have the time to work on it.

I've been reading some papers on materialized views lately. Here's some 
interesting ones:

Blakeley, Larson, Tompa: Efficiently Updating Materialized View
http://tinyurl.com/8hqeo
Describes a fairly simple algorithm for keeping select-project-join views 
up to date.

Vista: View Maintenance in Relational and Deductive Databases by 
Incremental Query Evaluation
http://tinyurl.com/exb8o
A survey of various algorithms.

Gupta, Mumick, Subrahmanian: Maintaining Views Incrementally
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=170066
Extended abstract of a paper that presents two algorithms: one similar to 
the Blakeley paper, and another one that can also handle recursion.

Ross, Srivastava, Sudarshan: Materialized View Maintenance and Integrity 
Constraint Checking: Trading Space for Time
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ross96materialized.html
Describes how materialized views can be used for implementing database 
assertions.

- Heikki