About LAST_REFRESH_DATE in Materialized views

Question

Hi, in the user_mviews view there is a field called LAST_REFRESH_DATE.
Does it show the time when the last refresh STARTED or when the last refresh FINISHED populating the materialized view?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yep, as Tekicora says: it's the time the last refresh started.
Ran a quick test ('cos I didn't know the answer) by creating a basic mview and refreshing it:
SQL> declare
  2  start_time CHAR(8);
  3  end_time CHAR(8);
  4  refresh_time CHAR(8);
  5  begin
  6  select to_char(sysdate,'HH24:MI:SS') into start_time from dual;
  7  dbms_mview.refresh('JJCMV');
  8  select to_char(sysdate,'HH24:MI:SS') into end_time from dual;
  9  select to_char(last_refresh_date,'HH24:MI:SS') into refresh_time from dba_mviews where mview_name = 'JJCMV'
10  dbms_output.put_line(start_time);
11  dbms_output.put_line(end_time);
12  dbms_output.put_line(refresh_time);
13* end;
SQL> /
20:37:22
20:46:36
20:37:23
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.Pretty crude, but I think it demonstrates the answer.