CREATE VIEW

Creates a new view. There are two types of views: normal and materialized.

Normal

Syntax:

CREATE [OR REPLACE] VIEW [IF NOT EXISTS] [db.]table_name [ON CLUSTER] AS SELECT ...

Normal views don’t store any data, they just perform a read from another table on each access. In other words, a normal view is nothing more than a saved query. When reading from a view, this saved query is used as a subquery in the FROM clause.

As an example, assume you’ve created a view:

CREATE VIEW view AS SELECT ...

and written a query:

SELECT a, b, c FROM view

This query is fully equivalent to using the subquery:

SELECT a, b, c FROM (SELECT ...)

Materialized

CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW [IF NOT EXISTS] [db.]table_name [ON CLUSTER] [TO[db.]name] [ENGINE = engine] [POPULATE] AS SELECT ...

Materialized views store data transformed by the corresponding SELECT query.

When creating a materialized view without TO [db].[table], you must specify ENGINE – the table engine for storing data.

When creating a materialized view with TO [db].[table], you must not use POPULATE.

A materialized view is implemented as follows: when inserting data to the table specified in SELECT, part of the inserted data is converted by this SELECT query, and the result is inserted in the view.

Important

Materialized views in ClickHouse are implemented more like insert triggers. If there’s some aggregation in the view query, it’s applied only to the batch of freshly inserted data. Any changes to existing data of source table (like update, delete, drop partition, etc.) doesn’t change the materialized view.

If you specify POPULATE, the existing table data is inserted in the view when creating it, as if making a CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT ... . Otherwise, the query contains only the data inserted in the table after creating the view. We don’t recommend using POPULATE, since data inserted in the table during the view creation will not be inserted in it.

A SELECT query can contain DISTINCT, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, LIMIT… Note that the corresponding conversions are performed independently on each block of inserted data. For example, if GROUP BY is set, data is aggregated during insertion, but only within a single packet of inserted data. The data won’t be further aggregated. The exception is when using an ENGINE that independently performs data aggregation, such as SummingMergeTree.

The execution of ALTER queries on materialized views has limitations, so they might be inconvenient. If the materialized view uses the construction TO [db.]name, you can DETACH the view, run ALTER for the target table, and then ATTACH the previously detached (DETACH) view.

Views look the same as normal tables. For example, they are listed in the result of the SHOW TABLES query.

There isn’t a separate query for deleting views. To delete a view, use DROP TABLE.