The other day we were having some slow database view at our project. It was the main view of the new module we were developing, and it was slowing down the whole application to an unacceptable point. It was a rather complex view and could not be optimized much more. So, what was the solution we adopted? We materialized the view.

Regular views store just the SQL script needed to retrieve the data, and every time they are consulted the stored SQL query is executed. However, materialized views not only store the script, but the retrieved records as well, making it much faster.

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