Managing Views

Views are customized presentations of data in one or more tables or other views. You can think of them as stored queries. Views do not actually contain data, but instead derive their data from the tables upon which they are based. These tables are referred to as the base tables of the view.

As with tables, views can be queried, updated, inserted into, and deleted from, with some restrictions. All operations performed on a view affect the base tables of the view. Views provide an additional level of security by restricting access to a predetermined set of rows and columns of a table. They also hide data complexity and store complex queries.

This section contains the following topics:

Creating a View
Displaying a View
Dropping a View