Indexed Views

Remember that without an index, a view does not have any physical representation of its data–rather, it just has metadata information pointing to the underlying objects. However, SQL Server will physically materialize a view’s data if you create a unique clustered index on the view. SQL Server will keep the indexed view in sync with modifications against the underlying tables. You cannot request to synchronize the view’s contents on demand or on scheduled basis. An indexed view is very much like a table index in terms of data integrity.

Indexed views can give you great performance benefits for queries that retrieve data. Indexed views can substantially reduce the amount of I/O required to return data and the processing time required ...

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