Refresh materialized views: Concurrency, transactional behaviour

Question

The official PostgreSQL 9.3 documentation on REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW does not yet describe it in detail.

A quote from this blog:

materialize

Answer 1

As of the release of Postgres 9.4 this isn't entirely the case. You can now refresh a materialized view concurrently using the REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY command. Functionally this refreshes the view, but does so without the read lock. It is a more expensive operation in terms of computation, but if the lock is a problem for you (as it was for me, which lead me down this path), then this isn't a bad way to go.

Here's some more info from the release notes: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.4#REFRESH_MATERIALIZED_VIEW_CONCURRENTLY