Re: Advice on using materialized views - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Wicher
Subject Re: Advice on using materialized views
Date
Msg-id 20211212131136.476d4de2@tipi
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Advice on using materialized views  ("Phil Endecott" <spam_from_pgsql_lists@chezphil.org>)
List pgsql-general
On Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:06:27 +0000
"Phil Endecott" <spam_from_pgsql_lists@chezphil.org> wrote:

> Thanks both for your replies.
> 
> Wicher wrote:
> > On Mon, 06 Dec 2021 18:48:47 +0000
> > "Phil Endecott" <spam_from_pgsql_lists@chezphil.org> wrote:  
> >> and 
> >> I need to modify the definition of a view that filters the "new" 
> >> values from the raw table each time the materialised view is 
> >> refreshed.  
> >
> > You won't necessarily need to rewrite the "recent data" view definitions, I think. What is
> > deemed "recent" depends on what's in the materialized views (it'd be anything newer than
> > whatever is in there). The good news is that you can simply query for that :-)
> > So trivially, in your "the data that is more recent than the stuff from the materialized
> > views" non-materialized view you'd use a definition like
> > SELECT .... WHERE sometimestamp > (select max(sometimestamp) from the_materialized_view)
> > or something along those lines.  
> 
> 
> I guess I was hoping that someone would suggest a more "magic"
> way to do this sort of thing. Actually I'm a bit surprised that
> materialised views don't event have a way to either
> 
> - Refresh a materialised view whenever a source table is modified;
> 
> - Refresh a materialised view whenever it is read, if a source table
> has changed since it was last refreshed.
> 
> Beyond that, I could imagine smart updates where e.g. if you
> modify source table rows with primary key K, then you only need
> to refresh materialised view rows derived from K.
> 
> I think this could all be done on top of triggers. I wonder, do any
> other databases do things like this automagically?
> 

Not too long ago I asking the list something similar but came up short:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20211129102315.058595fe@tipi

Here's my own take on that problem area, tangent to your question. This
project aims to do (or make it easier to do) the things you mention:

https://git.sr.ht/~nullenenenen/DBSamizdat

It supports your first use case out of the box, and may make your second use case easier
to accommodate, give it a go :-)


There's a sweet spot for materialized views. But at some point (volume/computational
load/freshness requirements) it becomes necessary to use tables instead so that you can
indeed implement efficient partial recalculation. As far as I know. I too am curious
about other approaches.



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