Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Using Views

Views can be thought of as virtual tables because the result sets returned by views have the same general form as a table, with columns and rows, and views can be referenced much like tables in queries. Several types of views can be created. Most views are used to join data from multiple tables so it can be accessed in a single result set. For example, you could create a CustOrder view that gets the customer’s first name, last name, address, account number, and telephone number from the Customers table and the last order details from the Orders table, which makes the information more manageable for your company’s sales representatives.

Views can be created from other views as well, which allows you to extract subsets of data from views ...