2. Populating and Refreshing Materialized Views
Before your dashboards can display information, you must first populate the data that drives the charts and visualizations. The xTuple Dashboards package uses PostgreSQL's materialized views for this, thereby insuring that query data will be returned with the maximum efficiency.
A materialized view is like a temporary table that can store data from a query you define. It makes it very easy to re-run that query and update the temporary table with new data. By having this data cached in its own table, queries can execute quickly, because all of the logic to calculate a KPI is already done. When you install the xTuple Dashboard extension, these materialized views are created, but they have not been populated with any data yet. Depending on the size of your database, populating the materialized views with data can take between 20 seconds to two hours. xTuple has made this population process a separate step after installation, to give you the flexibility to run the populate process when it's convenient for you. That way, you can wait to schedule the population for a time when you won't mind waiting up to two hours for information to populate.
In addition to the initial population of the dashboard materialized views, you must periodically refresh the dashboard materialized views to maintain up-to-date data. See the sections below for more information on how to perform the refresh steps.
