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

Chapter 10: Views
Editing V iews with T -SQL
The main thing to remember when you edit views with T-SQL is that you are completely replacing the existing
view. The only differences between using the ALTER VIEW statement and the CREATE VIEW statement are:
❑ ALTER VIEW expects to find an existing view, whereas CREATE doesn’t.
❑ ALTER VIEW retains any permissions that have been established for the view.
❑ ALTER VIEW retains any dependency information.
The second of these is the biggie. If you perform a DROP, and then use a CREATE, you have almost the
same effect as using an ALTER VIEW statement. The problem is that you need to entirely re-establish
your permissions on who can and can’t use the view.
Dropping Views
It doesn’t get much easier than this:
DROP VIEW , [,[ ...n]]
And it’s gone.
Creating and Editing V iews in the
Management Studio
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For people who really don’t know what they are doing, this has to be a rather cool feature in the Management
Studio. Building views is a snap, and you really don’t have to know all that much about queries
in order to get it done.
To take a look at this, fire up the Management Studio, open up the AdventureWorks2008 database sub-node
of the Databases node and right-click Views. Select New View, and up comes the dialog shown in Figure 10-1.
This dialog makes it easy for us to choose which tables we’re going to be including data from. The
Address table is selected in Figure 10-1, but we’re going to be working with not only a different table —
but four other tables.
This should beg the question: “How do I select more than one table?” Easy — just hold down your Ctrl
key while selecting all the tables you want. For now, start by clicking on the Customer table, and then
press and hold your Ctrl key while you also select the SalesOrderHeader, SalesOrderDetail, and
Product tables. You should wind up with all of them highlighted. Now click Add, and SQL Server will
add several tables to our view (indeed, on most systems, you should be able to see them being added to
the view editor that we’re about to take a look at).