What kind of data view do materialized views create in databases?

Materialized views create a static representation of live data in databases. This means that when a materialized view is created, it takes a snapshot of the data at that moment and stores it for later use. This snapshot is essentially a physical copy of the data from the base tables, which can be queried just like a regular table.

The advantage of using materialized views is that they enable faster access to the data because they do not require real-time querying of the underlying tables. Instead, users can retrieve data from the materialized view, which reduces the workload on the database and improves performance, especially with complex queries or aggregations that would otherwise take a long time to compute.

While the materialized view does contain data that was once live, it does not update itself automatically with new rows or changes from the base tables unless explicitly refreshed. This feature is particularly useful in scenarios where immediate data consistency is not critical but performance is.

In contrast, the other options describe different kinds of data representations. An analytical overview of past data refers more to historical analysis without the real-time snapshot aspect; a live-link to raw data sources implies active connections and real-time data retrieval, which is not the case for materialized views; while a transformed visualization of active records suggests