Query the definition of a materialized view in Postgres

I'm wondering how to query the definition of a materialized view in Postgres. For reference, what I hoped to do is very similar to what you can do for a regular view:

SELECT * FROM information_schema.views WHERE table_name = 'some_view';

which gives you the following columns:

table_catalog
table_schema
table_name
view_definition
check_option
is_updatable
is_insertable_into
is_trigger_updatable
is_trigger_deletable
is_trigger_insertable_into

Is this possible for materialized views?

From my research so far, it appears that materialized views are deliberately excluded from information_schema, because


The information_schema can only show objects that exist in the SQL standard.

(http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3794.1412980686@sss.pgh.pa.us)

Since they appear to being entirely excluded from information_schema, I'm not sure how to go about this, but what I'd like to do is twofold:

• Query whether a particular materialized view exists. (So far the only way I've found to do this is try creating a mat view with the same name and see if it blows up.)

• And then query the definition of the materialized view (similar to the view_definition column on information_schema.views).

Looks like 9.3 and up you can do:

select * from pg_matviews;
select * from pg_matviews where matviewname = 'view_name';

More info found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29297296/postgres-see-query-used-to-create-materialized-view

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#102620, answer score: 42