19

Views

In this chapter:

  • What is a view?

  • What types of views are available?

  • How do we use views?

  • What are metadata views?

There are various examples of views in other chapters. This chapter describes views in detail. A view is an overlay onto one or more other data sources. A data source can be a table, view, or multiples thereof.

19.1 What Is a View?

Imagine that you are working in an insurance company, where part of your job duties are to help users who have trouble writing queries for reports. The users have had basic training in writing SQL queries, but they often get stuck when they must join many tables or use subqueries. If you could set up the join or subquery ahead of time, then the users would have no trouble adding to it to refine ...

Get Oracle SQL now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.