On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:10 PM, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > * Peter Eisentraut (pete...@gmx.net) wrote: >> On 10/16/14 9:45 AM, Stephen Frost wrote: >> > Alright, coming back to this, I have to ask- how are matviews different >> > from views from the SQL standard's perspective? I tried looking through >> > the standard to figure it out (and I admit that I probably missed >> > something), but the only thing appears to be a statement in the standard >> > that (paraphrased) "functions are run with the view is queried" and that >> > strikes me as a relatively minor point.. >> >> To me, the main criterion is that you cannot DROP VIEW a materialized view. > > That is an entirely correctable situation. We don't require 'DROP > UNLOGGED TABLE'.
I think that's an inapposite comparison. The fact that a table is unlogged is merely a property of the table; it does not change the fact that it is a table. A materialized view, on the other hand, is different kind of object from a view. This manifests itself the fact that it's represented by a different relkind; and that different syntax is used not only for DROP but also for COMMENT, ALTER VIEW, SECURITY LABEL, and ALTER EXTENSION .. ADD/DROP; and that the set of supported operations on a materialized view is different from a regular view (and will probably be more different in the future). If we really want to change this, we can't just change DROP VIEW; we need to change all of the places in a consistent fashion, and we probably have to continue to support the old syntax so that we don't break existing dumps. But I think it's the wrong thing anyway, because it presumes that, when Kevin chose to make materialized views a different relkind and a different object type, rather than just a property of an object, he made the wrong call, and I don't agree with that. I think he got it exactly right. A materialized view is really much more like a table than a view: it has storage and can be vacuumed, clustered, analyzed, and so on. That's far more significant IMV than the difference between a table and unlogged table. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
