Re: GSoC - proposal - Materialized Views in PostgreSQL

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> On 4/9/10 1:36 PM, pavelbaros wrote:
>> 2) change rewriter
>> - usually, view is relation with defined rule and when rewriting, rule
>> is fired and relation (view) is replaced by definition of view. If
>> relation do not have rule, planner and executor behave to it as physical
>> table (relation). In case of materialized view we want to rewrite select
>> statement only in case when we refreshing MV. In other cases rewriter
>> should skip rewriting and pick up physical relation. Exclude situation
>> when other rewrite rules which are not related to MV definition are
>> specified.
>
> This was done (although not completed) against PostgreSQL 7.1 by
> students in Georgia, USA, I believe.  It might be worthwhile looking at
> their work if I can find it (if nowhere else, it should be in the ACM).
>
> There are basically 2 major parts for materialized views:
>
> A) Planner: Getting the query planner to swap in the MatView for part of
> a query automatically for query plan portions which the MatView supports;
>
> B) Maintenance: maintaining the MatView data according to the programmed
> scheme (synch, asynch, periodic).
>
> I do not believe it is possible to do both of the above in one summer.
> Of the two, (A) would be more useful since it is possible to manually
> implement (B) using triggers, queues and cron jobs today.

I don't believe that it's possible to do EITHER of those things in one
summer.  I believe that a basic implementation that has NO bells and
whistles at all, as originally proposed, is going to be a Very Hard
Project.

...Robert