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What is the idea behind using views? I have never used them

• mcny 5y ago
  Not OP but two main things: 1. Access control - you can create new SQL accounts and only give them access to select from specified views 2. Encapsulation and implementation hiding - the underlying table structure can change as long as the views exposed doesn't change. At least that's all I know. I'm sure people will add or correct when they read this.
  • noisy_boy 5y ago
    These are correct - some others are: - ability to do transformations uniformly e.g. if you want to represent a value in a certain way uniformly instead of having to do that in multiple places - ability to get generated values (like 'create_ts() - now()' to get the age of the record) directly from the database instead of computing it repetitively - move the join mechanisms on the database side to do those efficiently instead of the ORM having to do it (sometimes suboptimally); also helps with joins that are repetitive - ability to apply certain "default" filters e.g. if you are always fetching with predicate 'active = true', then you can include that in the view
• macintux 5y ago
  I used views several months ago when I implemented a tracking database for AWS SSM parameters: I wanted to retain a history of all changes to the parameters over time, and the schema was complex enough that queries for simple things like “what’s the current value?” weren’t simple at all. So, I wrapped common queries in views. (None of this should be taken as advice for how to approach such a problem.)