Quick questions on materialized views

[Glenstr]

If you can do what you want without MV's then go that route.

Having said that, are you creating the MV locally against a remnote table, or on the remote database itself?

I am creating the MV locally against a remote table. Having played some more with this I created a copy of the table itself locally and queried it, and that consistently returned a time of 6 seconds, so I am attributing the performance difference to oracle on linux versus oracle on windows (I have seen this before) rather than blaming the MV