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.