The final topic I read about in my Oracle 11g book was materialized views. These were originally referred to as snapshots. They improve performance. They are like views in that they are built using a query of one or more tables. However they retain the query results from a specific moment in time. Unlike normal views, they do not get refreshed automatically every time you access the view.We use materialized views on my project. There is a lot of data to roll up that our applications cannot do in real time. However the customers do not need an up to the minute accurate rollup. They want a reasonable approximation. Therefore we have two separate materialized views. The application will use one or the other, depending on which one is fresher. We alternate refreshing these two materialized views twice a day. It really works.
I am contemplating going for my Oracle Certified Professional certification. That will require a lot of learning. Specifically I want to be certified in Advanced PL/SQL. So I will be sharing what I learn with you.
