Creating and Managing Views

Views enable you to save frequently used or complex queries, then access them in a SELECT statement as if they were a table. A view is not physically materialized on disk: the query runs as a subquery when you access the view.

If a subquery is associated with a single query, consider using the WITH clause of the SELECT command instead of creating a seldom-used view.

Creating Views

The CREATE VIEWcommand defines a view of a query. For example:

CREATE VIEW comedies AS SELECT * FROM films WHERE kind = 'comedy';

Views ignore ORDER BY and SORT operations stored in the view.

Dropping Views

The DROP VIEW command removes a view. For example:

DROP VIEW topten;