Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Fourth Edition

Summary

Views can be thought of as virtual tables. Views are simply a way of presenting data in a format that is different from the way it actually exists in the database. The syntax of the CREATE VIEW statement uses a standard SELECT statement to create the view (with some exceptions). You can treat a view as a regular table and perform inserts, updates, deletes, and selects on it. We briefly discussed the use of database security and how views are commonly used to implement this security. Database security is covered in greater detail on Day 17.

The basic syntax used to create a view is

CREATE VIEW view_name AS
SELECT field_name(s) FROM table_name(s);

Here are the most common uses of views:

• To perform user security functions

• To convert units ...