SQL CREATE VIEW

Views can be considered as virtual tables. Generally speaking, a table has a set of definition, and it physically stores the data. A view also has a set of definitions, which is build on top of table(s) or other view(s), and it does not physically store the data.

The syntax for creating a view is as follows:

CREATE VIEW "VIEW_NAME" AS "SQL Statement"

"SQL Statement" can be any of the SQL statements we have discussed in this tutorial.

Let's use a simple example to illustrate. Say we have the following table:

TABLE Customer
(First_Name char(50),
Last_Name char(50),
Address char(50),
City char(50),
Country char(25),
Birth_Date date)

and we want to create a view called V_Customer that contains only the First_Name, Last_Name, and Country columns from this table, we would type in,

CREATE VIEW V_Customer
AS SELECT First_Name, Last_Name, Country
FROM Customer

Now we have a view called V_Customer with the following structure:

View V_Customer
(First_Name char(50),
Last_Name char(50),
Country char(25))

We can also use a view to apply joins to two tables. In this case, users only see one view rather than two tables, and the SQL statement users need to issue becomes much simpler. Let's say we have the following two tables:

Table Store_Information

store_name	Sales	Date
Los Angeles	$1500	Jan-05-1999
San Diego	$250	Jan-07-1999
Los Angeles	$300	Jan-08-1999
Boston	$700	Jan-08-1999

Table Geography

region_name	store_name
East	Boston
East	New York
West	Los Angeles
West	San Diego

and we want to build a view that has sales by region information. We would issue the following SQL statement:

CREATE VIEW V_REGION_SALES
AS SELECT A1.region_name REGION, SUM(A2.Sales) SALES
FROM Geography A1, Store_Information A2
WHERE A1.store_name = A2.store_name
GROUP BY A1.region_name

This gives us a view, V_REGION_SALES, that has been defined to store sales by region records. If we want to find out the content of this view, we type in,

SELECT * FROM V_REGION_SALES