As an analyst, either for reporting or machine learning tasks, it scratches my itch. I'm often creating wide, flat views with extended attributes. Many columns

As an analyst, either for reporting or machine learning tasks, it scratches my itch. I'm often creating wide, flat views with extended attributes. Many columns are nearly identical, for example, year as an integer, year a date type, etc. This is trivial with views, but ... For fast query performance, I usually materialize those views. But that's a multi-step and often manual process, requiring schedules or triggers. This feature combines both of those worlds, with fewer total database objects. Especially with ALTER TABLE.