At least in the DB we're using, Sybase SQLAnywhere, materialized views comes with a hefty price tag. They must be dropped and recreated every time you touch any of the base tables, like adding a column, which in turn requires any indexes on the materialized views to be recreated.

For a few of our customers, that meant that a 15 minute DB change (adding a column) turned into a several hour DB change (rebuilding materialized view).

If they're refreshed immediately, they also incur a penalty on the underlying tables, since any data changes essentially runs a trigger to see if the materialized view needs changes as well.

In our case we had one such immediate refresh materialized view which caused such a performance degradation of an underlying table that we had to find an alternate solution.