"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

November 05, 2010

SQL Server Views Revisited

It's been a long time I refreshed on my SQL Skills. Below post is on views.

Why view ?
  • Join Several Tables and Fetch Information
  • Hide the Query from End-users,Ex-Expose only aggregated results, Read-Only Information presented to users
  • Expose only required/relevant information to users
  • View with schemabinging -  When SCHEMABINDING is specified, the base table or tables cannot be modified in a way that would affect the view definition 
  • View can update underlying tables if it satisfies below conditions
    • View is created based on only one table
    • No Aggregate function in view definition (Reference)
  • List all view in DB
    • select * from sysobjects where xtype = 'v'
How a View Works -
  • Every time a query references a view, SQL Server substitutes the definition of the view into the query internally until a modified query is formed that only references base tables. Thus, Indexes on underlying tables are critical for performance of views
  • When a view is executed for the first time, only its query tree is stored in the procedure cache
  • Each time a view is accessed, its execution plan is recompiled.   
Partitioned view is a view defined by a UNION ALL of member tables structured in the same way, but stored separately as multiple tables
Indexed Views - SQL Server allows creation of index on view. Steps required for creating indexed views provided in link, link1. Best for OLAP systems where data is updated infrequently.



Happy Learning!!!

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