Materialized views in oracle
A materialized view in Oracle is a combination of a structure to hold the data (a table), a job that refreshes the data (a job), and a process that figures out how to refresh the data based on the specified query.  This process would generally involve the creation and maintenance of materialized view logs on the base table to track changes so that the materialized view can be refreshed incrementally though that is technically optional.  It is also common to organize multiple materialized views into refresh groups so that the materialized views themselves are transactionally consistent with each other.

The Materialized View Concepts and Architecture chapter of the Advanced Replication manual is a good place to start reading up about this sort of thing.