Defining a View

Define views for queries that you use frequently.

Suppose you frequently need to list employees by department. The following query creates a list of all employees by department and state that you can run against iqdemo:

SELECT Departments.DepartmentID,
  Departments.DepartmentName, Employees.EmployeeID,
  Employees.GivenName,Employees.Surname,
  Employees.Phone
FROM Departments, Employees
ORDER BY Employees.State

Running the query creates a results set that looks like this:

• Creating a View
  In Interactive SQL, you can use a CREATE VIEW statement to create and store a view.
• Displaying View Data
  Remember that the information in a view is not stored separately in the database. Each time you refer to the view, SQL executes the associated SELECT statement to find the appropriate data. This means that if the sales data changes, information in the view will be automatically up to date.
• Changing a View
  In Interactive SQL, you can use an ALTER VIEW statement to change a view definition with a modified version.
• Deleting Views
  You can delete a view in Interactive SQL or Sybase Central
• View Restrictions and Advanced Uses
  Views can be thought of as virtual tables. Any SELECT command can be used in a view definition except commands containing ORDER BY.