What is the purpose of views in SQL?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What are views good for?

I'm trying to figure out what the purpose of views in an SQL database is?

Why, when and how would I create and use views?

dupe http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214132/what-are-views-good-for — marcgg, Mar 04 '10 at 17:10

score 13 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 06 '15 at 06:31

Many different perspectives of the same table.
Can hide certain columns in a table. For example you may want to allow employees to see other employees' phone number column, but only certain employees to be able to access an employee's salary column!
Can provide huge time savings in writing queries by already having a group of frequently accessed tables joined together in a view.
Views allow you to use functions and manipulate data in ways that meet your requirements. For example, you store a person's birth date, but you like to calculate this to determine their age.

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 04 '10 at 17:11

3

It can be used to simplify complex joins that you use repeatedly across your DB.

CREATE view [dbo].[V_MyComplexJoin] 
As    
    Select TableA.A, TableB.B
    From TableA
        Inner Join TableB On TableA.BID = TableB.ID

answered Mar 04 '10 at 17:11

ChaosPandion

2 Answers2