Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap, 2nd Edition

Using Materialized Views for Better Performance

Materialized views are a special form of database view that performs much better than a normal view. If you aren’t familiar with views, they are a table-like construct that abstracts away a complex query. For example, you could create a view named ADDRESSES_WITH_STATES that abstracts away the need to join ADDRESSES and STATES together, like so:

CREATE VIEW addresses_with_states AS
  SELECT
    addresses.id,
    addresses.street,
    addresses.city,
    states.code AS state,
    addresses.zipcode
  FROM
    addresses
  JOIN states ON states.id = addresses.state_id;

Now, we can treat ADDRESSES_WITH_STATES just like a normal table for querying:

sql> select * from addresses_with_states ...