How to roll a join: Asynchronous incremental view maintenance

Incremental refresh of a materialized join view is often less expensive tha n a full, non-incremental refresh. However, it is still a potentially costl y atomic operation. This paper presents an algorithm that performs incremen tal view maintenance as a series of small, asynchronous steps. The size of each step can be controlled to limit contention between the refresh process and concurrent operations that access the materialized view or the underly ing relations. The algorithm supports point-in-time refresh, which allows a materialized view to be refreshed to any time between the last refresh and the present.