Whilst the ever increasing speed of storage and servers, and features likes In-memory are decreasing the need for large numbers of materialized views in databases, there are still plenty of use cases where they can be a useful performance or integrity tool.
But what if that materialized view takes minutes or hours to build? Then even if it is fast refresh enabled, than fast refresh is no of use if we have to rebuild the entire materialized view from scratch due to an structural change in the underlying table.
For example, let’s say I have a table and a simple fast refresh materialized view on that table as below: