I was sent several questions about Virtual Catalogs over this last month. So here are the answers…

• Q: My understanding is that items and categories are including in a Virtual Catalog by creating INCLUSION RULES.  Is there a limit to the number of INCLUSION RULES that I can create?
  • A: No. Though, practically speaking, there is a limit of ~80 base catalogs to a virtual catalog. And understand that the more of these there are, the more work SQL is having to do to stitch it all together. The best advice – is be practical and use common sense.
• Q: At what point (# of items) do you think a VIRTUAL CATALOG should be MATERIALIZED?
  • A: It is a good practice to always materialize virtual catalogs in production. This minimizes query overhead. And not materialize them in the environment being used for business users – to ensure that data is always up to date.
• Q: If I create a virtual catalog with 1,000 specific items (no variants or categories) do I need to rebuild the virtual every time I rebuild the base?
  • A: Base catalogs don’t get rebuilt. So the scenario described would not apply. If you are using a Virtual Catalog View (virtual on virtual), it would apply as the Base would change, needing a rebuild of the Virtual, which would in turn need a rebuild of the Virtual View. You need to rebuild whenever underlying data changes – and this is triggered automatically by the Catalog system.

Hope this helps!