How To Roll a Join: Asynchronous Incremental View Maintenance

Abstract

Incremental refresh of a materialized join view is often less expensive than a full, non-incremental refresh. However it is still a potentially costly atomic operation. This paper presents an algorithm that performs incremental view maintenance as a series of small, asynchronous steps. The size of each step can be controlled to limit contention between the refresh process and concurrent operations that access the materialized view or the underlying relations The algorithm supports point-in-time refresh, which allows a materialized view to be refreshed to any time between the last refresh and the present.