What is a Materialized View

You can think of a database view as a query that is stored in your database.

Views can be used in other queries and joined against other tables but will generally have to be recomputed each time they are referenced. For those reason, regular views are often called stored queries.

A materialized view is a special type of view that computes the result of the query and stores the result in the database. In other words, it materializes its results and stores a virtual table as opposed to just the query itself.

The next time a materialized view is referenced, the view is treated as a table and the query itself does not need to be computed.