Maintenance of Materialized Views: Problems, Techniques, and Applications

In this paper we motivate and describe materialized views, their applications, and the problems and techniques for their maintenance. We present a taxonomy of view maintenance problems based upon the class of views considered, upon the resources used to maintain the view, upon the types of modifications to the base data that are considered during maintenance, and whether the technique works for all instances of databases and modifications. We describe some of the view maintenance techniques proposed in the literature in terms of our taxonomy. Finally, we consider new and promising application domains that are likely to drive work in materialized views and view maintenance.