Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Using Views to Hide Underlying Table Structures

Another benefit to using views to access data is that they act as an additional layer between the application and the actual tables. This allows the view to be used to hide any changes that might be made to the underlying tables. The view shown in Listing 27.1 retrieves data from several columns in the sysprotects and sysobjects tables. If an application uses queries that access these tables directly, any changes made to the tables in future releases of SQL Server could break the application. If the application accesses the data through the view, however, only the view needs to be altered to accommodate the changes in the base tables. As long as the view returns the expected data, the structure ...