Indexed Views and Federations

Question

Are there plans to support Indexed Views in federated databases in the future? 

Answer 1

Hi BrianMcKinley,

Currently, indexed views are not supported in SQL Azure federation. I would suggest you submit a feedback about it on the Connect site:

http://connect.microsoft.com/sql

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Answer 2

Can anyone explain why indexed views cannot work with federations??

Answer 3

I would imagine this is because the overhead in working out when to recompute indexes on the views would be considerable and complicated (it already is just with normal databases).

It's a terrible pity because I'd love to use SQL Azure for data warehouse storage and take advantage of ROLAP aggregations (which are indexed views).  Federation is a perfect fit for us being able to scale out our data too - too bad eh.

Answer 4

I'd prefer it to error if it couldn't (easily) work out how and when to recompute indexed views.

I plan to use compound keys so it would be rather simple to calculate the indexed views (as they still all be local to the federation).

Rather annoying and it means that I won't be using Azure.

Answer 5

I agree - this feature would make SQL Azure a serious contender for highly scalable data warehousing in the cloud.  I suppose it still is if you are only using MOLAP or ROLAP without aggregations, but for us, we definitely need indexed views for aggregations.

The sad part will be that we are probably edge cases and this feature will never be important enough for Microsoft to spend the time implementing.

Answer 6

"Edge cases" are tomorrows scramble to implement mainstream feature.