Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

View Design Guidelines

In general, you can have as many views as you want. Views are not tables and do not take up any storage space (unless you create an index on the view). They are merely an abstraction for convenience. Except for indexed views, views do not store any data; the results of a view are materialized at the time the query is run against the view and the data is retrieved from the underlying tables. Views can be used to hide complex queries, can be used to control data access, and can be used in the same place as a table in the FROM statement of any SQL statement.

Following are some view design guidelines:

Use views to hide tables ...