Re: Materialized views WIP patch

Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 21:28 -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> > Attached is a patch that is still WIP but that I think is getting
> > pretty close to completion. It is not intended to be the be-all and
> > end-all for materialized views, but the minimum useful feature set --
> > which is all that I've had time to do for this release. In
> > particular, the view is only updated on demand by a complete rebuild.
> > For the next release, I hope to build on this base to allow more
> > eager and incremental updates, and perhaps a concurrent batch update.
>
> The documentation says that a materialized view is basically a
> create-table-as-select except that it remembers the query. Would you say
> that there is a compelling use case for this alone, or is this a
> building block for more sophisticated materialized view support (e.g.
> eager updating) later?

IMV, this has some slight value as it stands, although perhaps not enough
to justify a patch this big. The idea is that with this much in place,
patches to implement more aggressive and incremental maintenance of the
MV data become possible. So I think the bar it should pass for commit is
that it seems a sane basis for that, while providing some functionality
which people will find useful.

-Kevin