How does Snowflake handle maintenance of materialized views?

• A. They require manual refresh by a DBA
• B. Snowflake automatically maintains and refreshes them
• C. They never refresh automatically
• D. They refresh only on explicit command

Answer: (B)

Materialized views are precomputed results that speed up analytics, and Snowflake automatically keeps them in sync. Snowflake tracks the dependencies on the underlying base tables and refreshes the materialized view in the background whenever the base data changes, typically using incremental updates to minimize compute. This automatic maintenance means you don’t need to rely on a DBA or issue manual refreshes for routine updates; the system handles it for you, with the option to force a refresh if you ever need an immediate, full update.