Re: Materialized views

* Josh Berkus (josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com) wrote:
> > Well, there has to be some way to refresh an MV at regular intervals, no?
>
> For periodic update matviews, yes. However, Kevin needs only produce
> the command/function call for updating a generic periodic matview. He
> doesn't need to provide a scheduling utility. For simple cases, cron works.

Perhaps that would be an acceptable initial version, but I'd be pretty
disappointed and I certainly don't think we should stop there.

I'm quite aware of cron and as aware of the difficulties that many DBAs
are going to have getting cronjobs implemented. There's permission
issues (we see this already with the requests to provide an in-PG DBA
interface for pg_hba.conf..), locking issues (writing decent scripts
that don't destroy the box if they take a bit too long, like >5m on a
5m scheduled job), authentication issues (we don't really want these
running as superuser if we can avoid it..), and probably other things
I'm not thinking of.

Thanks,

Stephen