On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 1:36 PM, Melvin Davidson <melvin6...@gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO, I disagree. I feel a better name would be "materialized > table". The dictionary defines "materialize" as meaning "become actual fact" or "appear in bodily form". In the database environment, it generally means that the data is actually stored, rather than being something which can be generated. For example, in query execution the relation produced by an execution node may feed into a Materialize node if the generated relation is expected to be scanned multiple times by a higher-level node and scanning a stored copy of the relation each time is expected to be faster than regenerating the relation each time. "Materialized table" would be redundant; a table is always materialized. A view is data generated by running a query. In the simple case, the resulting relation is not stored, but is regenerated on each reference. The "materialized view" feature lets you materialize it, like a table. If you don't think materializing data means storing a copy of it for re-use, I'm not sure what you think it means. This is not to beat up on you, but to try to keep terminology clear, to facilitate efficient communication. There are some terms we have been unable to avoid using with different meanings in different contexts (e.g., "serialization"); that's unfortunate, but hard to avoid. I want to keep it to the minimum necessary by avoiding creep of other terms to multiple definitions. -- Kevin Grittner EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company