In data warehouses, you can use materialized views to precompute and store aggregated data such as the sum of sales. Materialized views in these environments are often referred to as summaries, because they store summarized data. They can also be used to precompute joins with or without aggregations.

What is a materialized view and when would it be used?

Views are generally used when data is to be accessed infrequently and data in table get updated on frequent basis. On other hand Materialized Views are used when data is to be accessed frequently and data in table not get updated on frequent basis.

What is the benefit of materialized view?

the big advantage of a Materialized View is extremely fast retrieval of aggregate data, since it is precomputed and stored, at the expense of insert/update/delete. The database will keep the Materialized View in sync with the real data, no need to re-invent the wheel, let the database do it for you.