Oracle TOAD and Materialised View

i am new to oracle.Already there is a store procedure which fetches data from many tables.Due to performance issue,i need to modify it.So i want to know about materialised view (since,i already searched it in net,but i am not able to understand it).can anyone explain the features of it?

Also,i am using TOAD for oracle.Can someone suggest me any materials(book,w开发者_如何学JAVAebsites etc.) to learn?

I'll take the Toad portion - you can get a ton of great help online for free at ToadWorld.com. I have a 35 page free tutorial there as well link text

Materialized View is covered in the documentation (eg here).

They don't make anything magically run faster. They move the performance hit (eg refresh the view at midnight and your procedure may run faster at 9am) but possibly at the expense of being 'up-to-date'. Or you could have REFRESH ON COMMIT MVs which can be more up to date, but maybe at the expense of concurrency and are also 'time shifting' work to when inserts/updates are done rather than queries.

MVs would be a long way down the list of things I'd consider for fixing a problem in a specific stored procedure.