A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for optimizing database queries using a materialized view for a table referenced in the query, wherein the materialized view has different properties than the referenced table. The materialized view may be replicated across multiple processors of the computer system, so that some or all of the query can be executed in a local fashion wherein there is no data movement required to perform the operations. The materialized view also may be partitioned across multiple processors of the computer system using a different partitioning key than the referenced table. The materialized view may be a vertical and/or horizontal subset of the table, so that only selected columns and/or tuples from the table are present therein. Columns may be added to the materialized view to contain pre-computed results of complex expressions, and indices may be created on the columns of the materialized view.