Oracle SQL: View and Materialized View

What is difference between View and Materialized View in Database or SQL?

Difference between View and Materialized view is one of the popular SQL interview question, much like truncate vs. delete, correlated vs. no correlated sub query or primary key vs. unique key.   This is one of the classic question which keeps appearing in SQL interview now and then and you simply can’t afford not to learn about them. Doesn’t matter if you are a programmer, developer or DBA, this SQL questions is common to all. Views are concept which not every programmer familiar of, it simply not in the category of CRUD operation or database transactions or SELECT query, its little advanced concept for average programmer. Views allows a level of separation than original table in terms of access rights but it always fetch updated data. Let’s see what View is in database, what materialized View and difference between view and materialized view in database.

What is View in database?

Views are logical virtual table created by “select query” but the result is not stored anywhere in the disk and every time we need to fire the query when we need data, so always we get updated or latest data from original tables. Performance of the view depend upon our select query. If we want to improve the performance of view we should avoid to use join statement in our query or if we need multiple joins between table always try to use index based column for joining as we know index based columns are faster than non-index based column. View allow to store definition of the query in the database itself.

What is Materialized View in database?

Materialized views are also logical view of our data driven by select query but the result of the query will get stored in the table or disk, also definition of the query will also store in the database .When we see the performance of Materialized view it is better than normal View because the data of materialized view will stored in table and table may be indexed so faster for joining also joining is done at the time of materialized views refresh time so no need to every time fire join statement as in case of view.

Difference between View vs. Materialized View in database

Based upon on our understanding of View and Materialized View, Let’s see, some short difference between them:

1) First difference between View and materialized view is that, In Views query result is not stored in the disk or database but Materialized view allow to store query result in disk or table.

2) Another difference between View vs. materialized view is that, when we create view using any table, rowid of view is same as original table but in case of Materialized view rowid is different.

3) One more difference between View and materialized view in database is that, In case of View we always get latest data but in case of Materialized view we need to refresh the view for getting latest data.

4) Performance of View is less than Materialized view.

5) This is continuation of first difference between View and Materialized View, In case of view its only the logical view of table no separate copy of table but in case of Materialized view we get physically separate copy of table

6) Last difference between View vs. Materialized View is that, In case of Materialized view we need extra trigger or some automatic method so that we can keep MV refreshed, this is not required for views in database.

When to Use View vs. Materialized View in SQL

Mostly in application we use views because they are more feasible, only logical representation of table data no extra space needed. We easily get replica of data and we can perform our operation on that data without affecting actual table data but when we see performance which is crucial for large application they use materialized view where Query Response time matters so materialized views are used mostly with data ware housing or business intelligence application.

That’s all on difference between View and materialized View in database or SQL. I suggest always prepare this question in good detail and if you can get some hands on practice like creating Views, getting data from Views then try that as well.