What are views good for?

Question

I\'m just trying to get a general idea of what views are used for in RDBMSes. That is to say, I know what a view is and how to make one. I also know what I\'ve used them f

Answer 1

Views hide the database complexity. They are great for a lot of reasons and are useful in a lot of situations, but if you have users that are allowed to write their own queries and reports, you can use them as a safeguard to make sure they don't submit badly designed queries with nasty cartesian joins that take down your database server.