Now you think to yourself, why are views utilized? You saw me define a view to you and you saw me create a view. I want to talk to you about why they're utilized. First of all, views hide the underlying complexity. Did you notice when I had three tables? I had the customers table, the sales table, and the employees table. I combined the data from the three tables so that I could show you. Basically, it would build a view off of the sales table in such a way that you would see the sales data listed. You would see the customer name listed and the employee name listed. You wouldn't see numbers, you would actually see names that are meaningful. They, the views, hide the underlying complexity behind each of the tables, and they hide the complexity behind these joint statements. If you recall, when you saw me construct the view, it was constructed based on a query or an SQL statement. Why have a user who does not need to understand the specifics of each of the tables, just so that they can view a report? It's to hide the complexity. That's the first thing. The next thing is for object security. What that means is, each of the tables, the sales table, the employee's table, and the customer's table, I don't want to give the report access to the sales table. I also don't want to give the report access to the employee's table because employee's table can have other characteristics. It can have employee ID, it can have Social Security number, it can have their salary. I don't want to give away all that. I just want to include the components or the columns that the report is interested in. Probably just a name of the employee, and perhaps maybe their start and end date, or something like that, so object security. The third reason is to make the data more meaningful. If I'm constructing a view, I'm going to construct it with a purpose in mind, that the report is going to be used in a view. I construct a view so that it would have only the columns that the report is interested in. Maybe that report is going to be a P&L report, for example, a profit and loss report, so construct a view with the data and components that it's conducive for printing a profit and loss report. Meaningful representation of data. The view can have column names that are meaningful. For example, as you saw when I did it, I had the column name called EmpName. Do you recall? I labeled it employee name to make it more meaningful because employee name is what the report wants to see. The report does not want to see EmpName. The users, the management, everyone understands employee name and customer name. The three primary reasons why views are utilized is because you really want to be able to hide unnecessary complexity associated with the underlying data elements. In this case, the tables. For object security, you want to be sure that the data is only being shown to the pieces, reports, to the user or applications that need to see it, and so that you can represent the data in a meaningful way. Those are the three big reasons why views are utilized.
