Re: GSoC - proposal - Materialized Views in PostgreSQL

2010/4/10 Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>:
> Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>>
>> 1. Keep the materialized view up-to-date when the base tables change.
>> This can be further divided into many steps, you can begin by supporting
>> automatic updates only on very simple views with e.g a single table and
>> a where clause. Then extend that to support joins, aggregates,
>> subqueries etc. Keeping it really limited, you could even require the
>> user to write the required triggers himself.
>
> That last bit doesn't strike me as much of an advance. Isn't the whole point
> of this to automate it? Creating greedy materialized views is usually not
> terribly difficult now, but you do have to write the triggers.

Yeah, I agree.

> The other thing that could be interesting about this would be some scheme
> for lazy refresh that didn't involve re-extracting the whole data set.

One way to do this would be to infer a primary key for the result set
based on the input query.  But I think we don't really have the
infrastructure to do this right now, so not really a project for a
beginner.

...Robert