Operational Path Characteristics of Materialized View Refreshes in Enterprise Oracle Warehousing Systems

Abstract

Materialized views play a critical role in large-scale Oracle data warehouses by enabling efficient analytical query performance through precomputed summaries. However, the refresh behavior of materialized views is highly sensitive to schema design, workload change patterns, and platform deployment architecture. This study analyzes refresh paths under varying configurations, including incremental and complete refresh strategies, partitioned and unpartitioned fact tables, and single-instance, RAC, and autonomous environments. The results show that incremental refresh achieves optimal performance when change activity remains localized within partition boundaries, while non-local updates and missing dependency logs trigger fallback to complete refresh, significantly increasing resource cost. Dependency chain length and platform coordination overhead further influence refresh stability. These findings highlight the importance of refresh-aware schema planning and workload-driven scheduling to maintain scalable and predictable warehouse performance.