Using Views

A view is a computed table defined by the result set of its view definition, which is expressed as a SQL query. You can use views to show database users exactly the information you want to present, in a format you can control.

A regular view describes a view that is recomputed each time you reference the view, and the result set is not stored on disk. This is the most commonly used type of view.

A materialized view describes a view whose result set is precomputed and materialized on disk similar to the contents of a base table. Materialized views are useful in data warehousing scenarios, where frequent queries of the actual base tables can be extremely expensive. Examples in this section refer to regular views.

Note: Materialized views are only supported for SQL Anywhere tables in the Sybase IQ catalog store.