Why do you create a View in a database?

Question

When and Why does some one decide that they need to create a View in their database? Why not just run a normal stored procedure or select?

Answer 1

This doesn't answer your question exactly but I thought it would be worth mentioning Materialized Views. My experience is mostly with Oracle but supposedly SQL-Server is fairly similar.

We used something similar in our architecture to address XML performance problems. Our systems are designed with a lot of data stored as XML on a row and applications might need to query particular values within it. Handling lots of XMLTypes and running XPaths across large number of rows has a large impact on performance so we use a form of materialized views to extract the desired XML nodes out into a relational table anytime the base table changes. This effectively provides a physical snapshot of the query at a point in time as opposed to standard views which would run their query on demand.