Fast refresh maintains a change log table, which records change vectors, not unlike how the redo logs work. There is overhead to this, as with a table that has a LOT of indexes on it, and inserts and updates will be slower. However if you are performing refreshes often, like every few minutes, you want to do fast refresh so you don't have to full-table-scan the source table. Complete refresh is good if you're going to refresh once a day. Does a full table scan on the source table, and recreats the snapshot/mview. Also inserts/updates on the source table are NOT impacted on tables where complete refresh snapshots have been created.