Materialized Views

An eye-catching graphic, largely irrelevant to this blog post.

The Materialized View API (related posts) provides resources for pre-aggregation and indexing of data for use in complex queries. It does this by managing denormalized tables based on data living elsewhere in the database (and possibly elsewhere). As such, materialized views (MVs) must be populated and updated using large amounts of data. As users change data on the site, MVs must be intelligently updated to avoid complete (read: very slow) rebuilds. Part of performing these intelligent updates is calculating how user changes to data affect MVs in use. Until now, these updates had limitations in scalability and capability.

I’ve faced a lot of skepticism (rightfully so) over my Materialized View module, which I’m pushing for inclusion in Drupal 7 as a solution to the overhead of table-per-field storage in Field API, as well as many other scalability issues.

I could have responded with contrived benchmarks, but I wanted real results. With Drupal 7 far from release and large projects on Drupal 7 even farther from release, I decided to rewrite MV for Drupal 6 and install it on Drupal.org to replace some of the worst queries.

I’ve posted a developer preview of Materialized Views for Drupal 6. I’d like ambitious Drupal developers to try it out so I can get feedback on the developer experience.