Materialized views are one of PostgreSQL’s most useful features for analytics and reporting workloads. They solve a very common problem: some queries are simply too expensive to run repeatedly in real time. Imagine a dashboard query that joins multiple large tables, aggregates millions of rows, and calculates metrics per customer. Running that query on every request can quickly become slow, expensive, and unpredictable under load. A materialized view solves this by storing the query result physically on disk. Instead of recalculating the query every time, PostgreSQL precomputes the result once and serves future reads directly from the stored data. CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW mv_ordersummary AS SELECT company_id , COUNT ( * ) AS total_orders , SUM ( amount ) AS revenue FROM orders GROUP BY company_id ; Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Querying the materialized view is fast because the expensive computation already happened earlier. But materialized views introduce a new problem: the data becomes stale.…