- SQL Server Management Studio
- SQL Server 2005 Infrastructure Management
- Operations Management Tools
- SQL Server 2005 Remote Management Features
- SQL Server Monitoring
- Managing Very Large Databases
- SQL Server Replication Enhancements
- High Availability for the Masses
- General Data Availability
- Indexed View
- Common Language Runtime and Database Administrator
- Business Intelligence and the Database Administrator
- Summary
Indexed View
An Oracle feature that Microsoft delivers in SQL Server 2005 is the indexed view. Application concurrency is increased with indexed views. Indexed views are called materialized views in Oracle circles. When a view contains an index, the index is created and stored in a unique clustered index in the same way that a table with a clustered index is stored. Nonclustered secondary indexes can be created after the first unique index is created. Within this new ability, developers can use index outer joins, scalar aggregates, and batches using ROLLUP and CUBE functions. The benefits of indexed view are as follows:
- The overhead of dynamically building the result set for each query that references the view can be eliminated.
- The optimizer can use the view index in queries that do not directly name the view in the FROM clause.
- Existing queries that reference columns in the indexed view can benefit from the improved efficiency of retrieving data from the indexed view without having to be recoded.
Here are some cases in which you might need to use indexed view:
- A frequently executed query aggregates data from several tables and uses an outer join to combine the results. A developer designs a view to provide the same results as the query. With support for indexed views containing outer joins, the developer can index the view and provide a more efficient solution to retrieve the aggregated data.
- You have a database that contains a number of computed columns, or you want to store computed columns in a view. Index view provides better query performance for these objects by use of the index.