Developing views in SQL Server

For the remainder of this chapter, we will focus our attention on Microsoft SQL Server functions and procedures that will help us understand and manipulate our data. The more we can manipulate our data to a desired outcome at database level, the less manipulation will be needed by BI developers, data analysts, or business users at the reporting level. This will make for a happy customer.

Quite often, a developer will find themselves querying the same results over and over again with minor changes to a filter a name or a filter a date on regular basis. This type of query is a good candidate to be converted into a view within SQL Server. There are certain advantages to creating a view compared to using the actual table for a query:

• Views can consolidate results from several tables with complex joins into a single location for user access

• Views can apply security on tables by restricting results on what is appropriate for a specific audience on the backend rather...