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Do You Know PS Materialized View? December 2020

By Alan Hwang posted 12-03-2020 07:29 AM

  

Do you know what is the materialized view?  Materialized view is a snapshot of a query.

Do you know what’s the difference on defining materialized view vs. regular view ? There are differences in six elements like Definition, Storage, and Query Execution. This brief article lists the key differences in an easy to comprehend manner.

Do you know what types of data is the best candidate to be defined in materialized views? The data is static and less likely change frequently such as configuration data.

Do you know how much performance improvement we will get when utilizing materialized view?

Read a helpful post on Stack Overflow for all the details.

Materialized view is not a view but a database table. There is no insert, update, delete on the materialized view, and it is good for read only. The content of the materialized view needs to be refreshed periodically, especially, when there is data insert, update, delete on the underneath tables/views which are related to the SQL definition of the materialized view. There is a maintenance page in PeopleSoft allows you to schedule the materialized view refresh.

Stay tuned for a detailed blog on the topic of Materialized View!

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12-04-2020 10:34 AM

User questions

Hi Chris,

 

I’ll try to answer your questions below:

We are currently using PeopleTools 8.56 and we have been using PS Materialized view for several years without any major issue. We have defined about 30 Materialized Views in Finance and all of them were created through Application Designer. I agree with you that you may see some issue in compiling them during Tools upgrade. The most common issue is the dependency among views, but it should be fine if you have Build Sequence No ordered correctly. I don’t see the issue of adding indexes at all. Since the Materialized View is a table, you can define multiple indexes on the same Materialized View. We use Materialized Maintenance Page to keep the view FRESH by specifying proper Refresh Interval that works pretty well too.

 

The biggest benefit of using Materialized View is the performance gain, simplify coding effort in SQL query and centralized the code in a single place and saving the developer or BA’s time to create their own code in PS Query. It also solves some of the technical issues that can’t be done in PS Query.

 

You also can see the Oracle Materialized View related  information in metadata view,  All_Mviews and All_snapshots .

I’ll post another detail Blog on this subject in Jan. 2021. Please let me know if you have more question regarding this.

 

Questions:

Do other people have success maintaining PeopleSoft Materialized Views (creating them through Application Designer)?  Our experience is that they aren't well supported, so when you compile them (like during PeopleTools upgrades and initial development) they'll sometimes compile as a SQL view.  Also, adding indexes may not be officially supported (I forget) and certainly have a tendency to vanish.  They're a great concept, but I'm curious if folks have had them working for years without the problems we have.  At this point I warn folks to use a custom AE + table, at least for simple use cases.  We're on PeopleTools 8.57 with an Oracle database.

 

Thanks,

 

Alan Hwang

 

ePro Tech Lead

UNC at Chapel Hill

919-445-9423

 

From: Anna Kourouniotis <anna.kourouniotis@duke.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 8:45 AM
To: Hwang, Alan <alan_hwang@unc.edu>
Subject: FW: Did You Know about PeopleSoft Materialized view?

 

Hi Alan,

 

Do you think you could provide some feedback for Chris?

 

Cheers!

Anna

 

Anna Kourouniotis | Database Analyst II

 

From: Chris Palmer <tech.ps@list.heug.org>
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 8:30 AM
To: tech.ps@list.heug.org
Subject: [TECH.ps] - RE: Did You Know about PeopleSoft Materialized view?

 

Do other people have success maintaining PeopleSoft Materialized Views (creating them through Application Designer)?  Our experience is that they aren't well supported, so when you compile them (like during PeopleTools upgrades and initial development) they'll sometimes compile as a SQL view.  Also, adding indexes may not be officially supported (I forget) and certainly have a tendency to vanish.  They're a great concept, but I'm curious if folks have had them working for years without the problems we have.  At this point I warn folks to use a custom AE + table, at least for simple use cases.  We're on PeopleTools 8.57 with an Oracle database.

 

Posted By: Chris Palmer, Technical Analyst at Ohio State University
Email Address: palmer.469@osu.edu