
Chapter 8
Handling Materialized Views
Similar to indexes, materialized views are redundant data structures that can
be used to speed up query processing. A view is a virtual table whose content
is derived from base tables by using a subset of Standard Query Language
(SQL) (we discuss the language used to define views in Section 8.1). A view is
materialized by defining an appropriate clustered index. Then, the content of
the view is persisted and maintained as if it were a regular table, which can be
indexed and leveraged to answer queries efficiently. Consider again the query
from Chapter 2 that returns the names of employees working in departments
with budgets ...