What is a view?
Simply stated, an SQL view is a virtual table.
In contrast to actual tables, views do not contain data. Instead, they contain SELECT statements. The data to display is retrieved using those SELECT statements.
One advantage of using views is that it allows programmers to simplify their code. They can write relatively complex SELECT statements to join multiple tables into a single virtual table. Once that is done, they can access that virtual table like a normal table and perform simple searches on it.
In addition, views also allow us to restrict access to certain data in our tables. For instance, suppose we have a table with three columns - id, password and email. If we do not want other programmers to have access to all the data in the tables (such as the password column), we can create a view with only the id and email columns and let them have access to the view instead.
