What is a view used for?

What is the purpose of a view?

Views are generally used to focus, simplify, and customize the perception each user has of the database. Views can be used as security mechanisms by letting users access data through the view, without granting the users permissions to directly access the underlying base tables of the view.

What is a view and when should it be used?

Views are acceptable when you want to restrict users to a particular subset of data. For instance, if you do not delete records but only mark the current one as active and the older versions as inactive, you want a view to use to select only the active records.

What is the advantage of using a view?

A view can draw data from several different tables and present it as a single table, turning multi-table queries into single-table queries against the view. Views can give a user a "personalized" view of the database structure, presenting the database as a set of virtual tables that make sense for that user.