Synchronous incremental update of materialized views for PostgreSQL

Abstract

Materialized views are logically excess stored query results in SQL-oriented databases. This technology can significantly improve the performance of database systems. Although the idea of materialized views came up in the 1980s, only three database management systems, i.e. DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, have been successfully developed completely enough with materialized views so far. The barrier lies in building a module that can incrementally update the materialized views automatically, which corresponds to data changes in the base tables. This paper presents the algorithm to incrementally update the materialized views with inner join, focusing on one with aggregate functions, and building of a program that automatically generates codes inPL/pgSQL for triggers, which can undertake synchronous incremental updates of the materialized views in PostgreSQL.