Materialized view selection is a critical problem in many applications such as query processing, data warehousing, distributed and semantic web databases, etc. We refer to the problem of selecting an appropriate set of materialized views as the view selection problem. Many different view selection methods have been proposed in the literature to address this issue. The present paper provides a survey of view selection methods. It defines a framework for highlighting the view selection problem by identifying the main dimensions that are the basis in the classification of view selection methods. Based on this classification, this study reviews most of the view selection methods by identifying respective potentials and limits.