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SQL Server FAQs - Understanding and Managing Views

By: FYIcenter.com

A collection of 21 FAQs on SQL Server database views. Clear answers are provided with tutorial exercises on creating and dropping views; defining and viewing view columns; creating views from multiple tables; inserting, updating and deleting data in underlying tables; creating schema binding view; creating indexes on views. Topics included in this FAQ are:

1. What Are Views?
2. How To Create a View on an Existing Table?
3. How To See Existing Views?
4. How To Drop Existing Views from a Database?
5. How To Get a List of Columns in a View using "sys.columns"?
6. How To Get a List of Columns in a View using the "sp_columns" Stored Procedure?
7. How To Get a List of Columns in a View using the "sp_help" Stored Procedure?
8. How To Generate CREATE VIEW Script on an Existing View?
9. How To Get the Definition of a View Out of the SQL Server?
10. Can You Create a View with Data from Multiple Tables?
11. Can You Create a View using Data from Another View?
12. What Happens If You Delete a Table That Is Used by a View?
13. Can You Use ORDER BY When Defining a View?
14. How To Modify the Underlying Query of an Existing View?
15. Can You Insert Data into a View?
16. Can You Update Data in a View?
17. Can You Delete Data from a View?
18. How To Assign New Column Names in a View?
19. How Column Data Types Are Determined in a View?
20. How To Bind a View to the Schema of the Underlying Tables?
21. How To Create an Index on a View?

Please note that all answers and tutorials are based on MS SQL Server 2005. To follow tutorials in this collection, you should connect to SQL server as a regular user who has enough permissions to run simple Transact-SQL statements. To follow tutorial exercises in this collection, you need to use test tables created from previous tutorial collections.

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