Materializing a view by hand

Robert James <srobertjames@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a view which is very slow to computer, but doesn't change often.

I'd like to materialize it. I thought I'd do a simple poor man's
materialize by:

1) ALTER VIEW myview RENAME to _myview
2) SELECT * INTO myview FROM _myview

The only problem is that all my other views, which are dependent on
myview, automatically rename to _myview.  That would normally be very
helpful but is exactly the opposite of what I want!

Is there a work around?

The best I can think of would be to use pg_dump to do a of that one
view (-t myview), and run the GRANT and REVOKE statements from that
after the rename and materialization.

I'm running Postgres 8.3 - upgrading is a possibility but difficult.

The upcoming 9.3 release will have minimal support for materialized
views, but there is no feature to transform a view into a
materialized view in that release, or on the roadmap.  I wonder
whether this comes up often enough to consider adding such a
feature to a future release.

--
Kevin Grittner
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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All your view and function creation statements should be in scripts that
you maintain as a kind of best practice. If you've done that, then you can
simply drop/cascade the view you're replacing after you renamed it and then
rebuild the rest of them.

I actually go one step further and put the view creation scripts into a
function: then I can just do 'SELECT RebuildViews();' at appropriate
moments. This typically happens at the very end of the materialization
process switcheroo I have to do if my view has to be available while the
materialization is happening. Postgres 9.4 will make this technique
basically obsolete with the lock-free refresh (Thanks Kevin!).

merlin

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Robert James <srobertjames@gmail.com>wrote: