Creating Views
A view is a virtual table that contains selected rows and columns from one or more tables or views. InterBase stores only the definition of a view. The contents of a view are essentially pointers to data in the underlying tables. When you create a view, you are not copying data from the source tables to the view. You are looking at the original data.
A view often functions as a security device, because you can give people permissions on a view but not on the underlying tables. Thus, the people can access a defined part of the data (the part defined in the view), but the rest of the data remains private.
In the following exercise, you use the CREATE VIEW statement to create a phone list by choosing the employee number, first name, last name, and phone extension from the Employee table and the employee’s location and department phone number from the Department table. Views are frequently created to store an often-used query or set of queries in the database.
You can select from a view just as you can from a table. Other operations are more restricted. See “Working with Views” in the Data Definition Guide for more on views.
