Database Design for Mere Mortals®: A Hands-on Guide to Relational Database Design, Third Edition

12. Views

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

—FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY

Topics Covered in This Chapter

What Are Views?

Anatomy of a View

Determining and Defining Views

Case Study

Summary

Review Questions

What Are Views?

As you learned in Chapter 3, “Terminology,” a view is a virtual table composed of fields from one or more tables in the database; it can also include fields from other views. The tables and views that comprise a given view are known as the view’s base tables. A view is “virtual” because it draws data from base tables rather than storing data on its own. In fact, the only information about a view that is stored in the database is its structure; the RDBMS rebuilds and “repopulates” ...