This is part of a series of articles about new features and differences in PeopleTools 8.54 that will be of interest to the Oracle DBA.
Materialized Views in the Database
Snapshots were introduced in Oracle 7. They were a way of building and maintaining a physical table to hold the results of a SQL query. We are well used to a view being the results of a query, but here the results are materialised into a physical table. Hence the feature was renamed materialized views in Oracle 8i.
Today materialized views are one among many replication technologies. They are available in standard edition Oracle, and there is no licensing implication in their use.
Materialized views can generally be put into two categories