Back To Basics: Views, what exactly are they?

Views are strange objects.  They look like tables, can be queried like a table, but they don’t store any actual data.  Think of them as a virtual table which has pointers back to the source tables.  Views can combine data from one or more tables via joins just like a select statement.

Using views does not help or hurt your query performance.  However if you create an index on your view, it will help your performance, however it will increase your storage as SQL will now need to keep the data for the columns of the index from the view on the disk within the index.

Personally I’m not a fan of views, as it distorts the schema of the database.  However like all objects within the database there is a time and a place for thier use.

Denny