How to copy a materialized view to a table

Materialized views over a DB link most certainly can be set up as fast refreshes (i.e. only changes since the last refresh) as we use this approach ourselves. However, what cannot be done are refresh on commit mviews over a DB link, so the mview will have to be on a refresh schedule (unless you simply want to refresh on demand, of course).

This works on Oracle Database Versions >= 10g (personally tested). I can't vouch for < 10g versions since I started using Oracle Database in 10g.

We see very little database impact on both of our source DB's and destination DB's using this approach with roughly 30 mviews (most are medium size tables, a few million rows each) that refresh every 15 minutes.

A few notes/gotchas: The mview log has to be created on the source DB, not the destination DB (which is usually a point of confusion with this setup).

Create the DB link on the destination DB that connects to the source DB. If the usercode that the DB link is using to connect to the source DB is different than the schema where the table/mview log table resides, then the DB link usercode on the source DB will have to be granted select privileges on both the source table and the source mview log table.

In addition, the mview log deletions don't move the HWM, so for large transactional tables, you may want to consider having a nightly process that locks the mview log table, then checks if the mview log table is empty, then truncate the mview log table in order to reset the HWM to keep fast refreshes as fast as possible.

PostgreSQL databases cannot "see" each other by default. This is a good thing.

You can make one pg database see another by using the postgres_fdw Foreign Data Wrapper: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/postgres-fdw.html

Steps:

1. Add the extension
2. Create the foreign server
3. Create the user mapping
4. Create the foreign table. See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-importforeignschema.html if you have 9.5+
5. Create the materialized view pointing to the foreign table