Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Indexed Views

As stated earlier in this chapter, views are simply stored SELECT statements, and as such, have no data storage requirements and incur little if any overhead in the database. However, just when you thought it was safe to come out of the server room, SQL Server 2000 introduces the concept of the indexed view. Just as it sounds, an indexed view is one on which you create an index. To be more precise, an indexed view is one on which there exists a unique clustered index. When a unique clustered index is defined on a view, the resultset generated by the view is materialized and stored in the leaf level of the index as if the clustered index were defined on a table. When the data in the underlying base table(s) changes, the data in the ...