Currently, we can’t refresh a materialized view inside an explicit transaction:

demo@127.0.0.1:26257/movr  OPEN> REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW overdrawn_accounts;
ERROR: cannot refresh view in an explicit transaction
SQLSTATE: 25000

Refresh is an asynchronous job which can be difficult for use to handle inside a transaction.

This is problematic because many users leverage ORMs who often wrap all SQL inside explicit transactions. As a result, a developer could create a materialized view but not be able to refresh it, rendering it unusable. We should support transactional refreshes both for this use case and because developers may want to leverage the results of a refreshed view later on within an explicit transaction.

Jira issue: CRDB-7833