Views

As a business grows, its financial management and reporting needs will probably grow as well. Management will turn to the database for answers. Every database query will be different, but eventually, it will become clear that the same, or very similar, SELECT statements seem to come up again and again. The same SELECT statement could show up in a subquery, or maybe in a stored procedure, which is something we'll learn about soon. That statement could become really complicated, with a lot of tables, outer joins, CASE statements of its own. If we could somehow save that SELECT statement and then use it like a table as a basis for other SQL statements and queries, we could save a lot of time and effort. SQL views will help solve this problem.

SQL views can encapsulate complex queries, exposing the columns in a much cleaner way for use by other queries. In other words, a view can join multiple tables together in a defined, structured way, and substitute all of that complexity...