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
Determining and Defining Views
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” ...
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