What does the use of Snowflake materialized view involve with regards to external tables?

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The use of Snowflake materialized view involves creating a summary of data from one or more tables. The materialized view is stored as a physical object in Snowflake and can be used to improve the performance of queries that are repeatedly executed.

With regards to external tables, materialized views can be created based on the data in external tables. Snowflake supports creating materialized views based on data stored in external S3, Azure, or Google Cloud Storage accounts. This allows users to easily create summary tables based on data that is stored outside of Snowflake.

Materialized views based on external tables can provide significant performance benefits, as the data in the summary table is pre-computed and stored locally within Snowflake. This means that queries against the materialized view can be executed much faster than queries against the raw data in the external table.