Practical SQL Handbook, The: Using SQL Variants, Fourth Edition

Summary

This chapter covered views that allow you to control just how your users see data:

• The familiar CREATE and DROP keywords allow you to set up and remove views. You retrieve data through views with the SELECT statement, treating the view as a kind of table. However, the view does not contain any data: It is simply a way of looking at table data.

• Views allow you to provide focus, simplification, and customization of tables. They also offer a security mechanism (they restrict users from seeing tables but provide access to views based on the tables). In addition, views keep the data independent of the database structure.

• System catalogs hold the view definition. When you query the view, SQL runs the query that created the view. Because of this, ...