Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 10: Views
The preceding syntax just represents the minimum, of course, but it’s still all we need in a large percentage
of the situations. The more extended syntax looks like this:
CREATE VIEW []. [()]
[WITH [ENCRYPTION] [[,] SCHEMABINDING] [[,] VIEW_METADATA]]
AS
[WITH CHECK OPTION][;]
We’ll be looking at each piece of this individually, but, for now, let’s go ahead and dive right in with an
extremely simple view.
Try It Out Creating a Simple View
We’ll call this one our customer phone list, and create it as CustomerPhoneList_vw in the Accounting
database that we created back in Chapter 5:
USE Accounting;
GO
CREATE VIEW CustomerPhoneList_vw
AS
SELECT CustomerName, Contact, Phone
FROM Customers;
Notice that when you execute the CREATE statement in the Management Studio, it works just like all the
other CREATE statements we’ve done — it doesn’t return any rows. It just lets us know that the view has
been created:
Command(s) completed successfully.
Now switch to using the grid view (if you’re not already there) to make it easy to see more than one
result set. Then run a SELECT statement against your view — using it just as you would for a table —
and another against the Customers table directly:
SELECT * FROM CustomerPhoneList_vw;
SELECT * FROM Customers;
How It Works
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What you get back looks almost identical to the previous result set — indeed, in the columns that they
have in common, the two result sets are identical. To clarify how SQL Server is looking at your query on
the view, let’s break it down logically a bit. The SELECT statement in your view is defined as:
SELECT CustomerName, Contact, Phone
FROM Customers;
So when you run:
SELECT * FROM CustomerPhoneList_vw;