Materialized views and redo

On a system which otherwise generates very little redo (since about 99% of all transactions are read-only, using only SELECTs), we have a materialized view which is refreshed once an hour. This was introduced to give a far better response time on a common query type which ran in 15 seconds without the view, but now runs in a second or less, using the materialized view.  

So far so good... but:  

Every time the materialized view is refreshed, this generates about 40Mb of redo activity, which means our archived logfiles area is now growing at a rate of around 1Gb per day. For comparison, before the materialized view was introduced, we only used to get about 50Mb of newly archived log files per day.  

Now, all this redo relates to the refreshing of an object which can easily be regenerated by simply refreshing the view. There's no conceivable scenario where this redo would ever be needed. So, is there any way of completely "switching off" the generation of redo log entries whenever the materialized view is auto-refreshed? This would save what's becoming a bit of a disk-space headache.  

Paul  

Paul Vincent
Database Administrator
Information and Communication Technology UCE Birmingham
paul.vincent_at_uce.ac.uk  

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