Regular views have no storage cost but no performance benefit - they execute the query every time.

Materialized views trade storage and refresh overhead for fast queries. Typical speedup: 10-100x.

Refresh during low-traffic periods. Use CONCURRENTLY to avoid blocking. Index materialized views for best query performance.

Choose refresh frequency based on: (query_frequency × time_saved) > refresh_time

Materialized views provide 10-100x speedup for complex queries

Index materialized views on commonly filtered/sorted columns

Use CONCURRENTLY refresh to avoid locking

Schedule refreshes during low-traffic periods

Consider incremental refresh for large materialized views

Regular views have zero performance benefit - they execute query every time

Using regular views expecting performance improvement - they don't cache results

Forgetting to refresh materialized views - data becomes stale

Refreshing too frequently - wastes resources

Not indexing materialized views - loses performance benefit

Using materialized views for real-time data - staleness is unacceptable