In the world of database architecture, the need to dynamically create complex objects conflicts with the demand for subsecond response time. Oracle's answer to this dilemma is the materialized view.

In order to use materialized views, the Oracle DBA must set special initialization parameters and grant special authority to the users of materialized views. You ...

I'm not much of a DB guy, I just read stuff out of them. For an application we have, some data is coming from views (specifically made for the application) that join up tables from various sources.