A materialized view has a rule just like a view and a heap and
other physical properties like a table. The rule is only used to
populate the table, references in queries refer to the
materialized data.
This is a minimal implementation, but should still be useful in
many cases. Currently data is only populated "on demand" by the
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW and REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW statements.
It is expected that future releases will add incremental updates
with various timings, and that a more refined concept of defining
what is "fresh" data will be developed. At some point it may even
be possible to have queries use a materialized in place of
references to underlying tables, but that requires the other
above-mentioned features to be working first.
Much of the documentation work by Robert Haas.
Review by Noah Misch, Thom Brown, Robert Haas, Marko Tiikkaja
Security review by KaiGai Kohei, with a decision on how best to
implement sepgsql still pending.
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
Making this operation look like a utility statement seems generally a good
idea, and particularly so in light of the desire to provide command
triggers for utility statements. The original choice of representing it as
SELECT with an IntoClause appendage had metastasized into rather a lot of
places, unfortunately, so that this patch is a great deal more complicated
than one might at first expect.
In particular, keeping EXPLAIN working for SELECT INTO and CREATE TABLE AS
subcommands required restructuring some EXPLAIN-related APIs. Add-on code
that calls ExplainOnePlan or ExplainOneUtility, or uses
ExplainOneQuery_hook, will need adjustment.
Also, the cases PREPARE ... SELECT INTO and CREATE RULE ... SELECT INTO,
which formerly were accepted though undocumented, are no longer accepted.
The PREPARE case can be replaced with use of CREATE TABLE AS EXECUTE.
The CREATE RULE case doesn't seem to have much real-world use (since the
rule would work only once before failing with "table already exists"),
so we'll not bother with that one.
Both SELECT INTO and CREATE TABLE AS still return a command tag of
"SELECT nnnn". There was some discussion of returning "CREATE TABLE nnnn",
but for the moment backwards compatibility wins the day.
Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Kevin Grittner
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane