In designing your application, consider defining materialized views for frequently-executed expensive queries or expensive parts of your queries, such as those involving intensive aggregation and join operations. Materialized views are designed to improve performance in environments where:

You do not have to change your queries to benefit from materialized views. For example, materialized views are ideal for use with data warehousing applications where the underlying data doesn't change very often.

The optimizer maintains a list of materialized views to consider as candidates for partially or fully satisfying a submitted query when optimizing. If the optimizer finds a candidate materialized view that can satisfy all or part of the query, it includes the view in the recommendations it makes for the enumeration phase of optimization, where the best plan is determined based on cost. The process used by the optimizer to match materialized views to queries is called view matching. Before a materialized view can be considered by the optimizer, the view must satisfy certain conditions. This means that unless a materialized view is explicitly referenced by the query, there is no guarantee that it will be used by the optimizer. You can, however, make sure that the conditions are met for the view to be considered.

If the optimizer determines that materialized view usage is allowed, then each candidate materialized view is examined. A materialized view is considered for use by the View Matching algorithm if:

If the materialized view meets the above criteria, and it is found to satisfy all or part of the query, the View Matching algorithm includes the materialized view in its recommendations for the enumeration phase of optimization, when the best plan is found based on cost. However, this does not mean that the materialized view will ultimately be used in the final execution plan. For example, materialized views that appear suitable for computing the result of a query may still not be used if another access plan, which doesn't use the materialized view, is estimated to be cheaper.